When the wails of discomfort about reading a screen abated, the wails of hard work arose. Even if the particular texts we had previously read were difficult to the students, they was also familiar enough in appearance, form and genre that they did not demand a reading technique different to that passive absorption of information the students applied to 'fun' books, magazines and newspapers.

As Jane Yellowlees Douglas argues:

"the problem with getting inside the act of reading is its ubiquity - there's no escaping it, and like any environment with which we're overly familiar, we no longer see it…we never come face to face with the ground zero of reading." (Joyce, 61-2)

Patchwork Girl plummeted 201, without mercy, to the ground zero of critical reading.