It’s still summer—hot enough for y’all?—and I’m still working on some fantastic new blog posts. In the meantime, I want to revisit my archives and bring some new information to your attention. Let’s get started, shall we?
✱ Digital reading
This is a topic that’s going to become hotter and hotter as the data begins to roll in. I’ve got my own rudimentary data (“Sleep, Walk, Read: My Highly Unscientific Notes About My E-Reading Habits”) but folks a lot smarter than me have begun observing the way humans process what we read (“Give Me That Old-Time Religion”). E-reading is good for some things, not so good for others.
This is particularly true in a school environment, where “nearly 1 in 3 public and private school students in the United States now [use] a school-issued mobile computing device, such as a laptop or digital tablet,” according to this article (“Digital Reading Poses Learning Challenges for Students”) in Education Week.
Researchers now say that while many digital texts do a good job of motivating and engaging young people, such texts also pose a number of problems.
When reading on screens, for example, people seem to reflexively skim the surface of texts in search of specific information, rather than dive in deeply in order to draw inferences, construct complex arguments, or make connections to their own experiences. Research has also found that students, when reading digitally, tend to discard familiar print-based strategies for boosting comprehension.
And many of the multimedia elements, animations, and interactive features found in e-books appear to function primarily as amusing distractions.
A fascinating article in the November 2013 print issue of Scientific American (photocopied and mailed to me by a friend, but without the title page) reports:
Prolonged reading on glossy, self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. In an experiment by Erik Wästlund, then at Karlstad University in Sweden, people who took a reading comprehension test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
So don’t take those paper books to Goodwill just yet. 🙂
✱ Reading Well to Write Well
Another favorite topic of mine is the idea that you cannot be a good writer unless you’re a good reader (“Reading Up: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats”). We learn so much (by osmosis, as my mother used to say) from reading the work of others that we’d be crazy not to do it. That’s why I was completely charmed by this post on Open Culture: “David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature with Lightweight Books.”
Wallace’s choice of texts is of interest as well—surprising for a writer most detractors call “pretentious.” For his class, Wallace prescribed airport-bookstore standards—what he calls “popular or commercial fiction”—such as Jackie Collins’ Rock Star, Stephen King’s Carrie, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and James Elroy’s The Big Nowhere. The UT Austin site also has scans of some well-worn paperback teacher’s copies, with the red-ink marginal notes, discussion questions, and underlines one finds behind every podium.
I include this link here strictly for your enjoyment. 🙂
✱ “Great Books/Big Ideas”
We’ve talked some about reading (or not reading) the classics (“Cars and Literature: A Classic Vintage”), about cultural literacy (“The World Should Be Your Oyster”) but here’s a beautiful story about two people who exemplified that life, taken from a piece by the New York Times’s David Brooks (“Love Story”):
Berlin and Akhmatova were from a culture that assumed that, if you want to live a decent life, you have to possess a certain intellectual scope. You have to grapple with the big ideas and the big books that teach you how to experience life in all its richness and make subtle moral and emotional judgments.
Berlin and Akhmatova could experience that sort of life-altering conversation because they had done the reading. They were spiritually ambitious. They had the common language of literature, written by geniuses who understand us better than we understand ourselves.
I’m not saying that reading the classics is going to reveal the love of your life. 🙂 But you never know … and it’s certainly a way to enjoy your interior life. (Read Joe Queenan’s One for the Books and you’ll see what I mean.) And I’d be willing to bet you have had the experience of bonding with someone over the mutual love of a particular book or author!
* Because it’s almost summer and because I am still positively slammed with work (not a bad thing) and because slammed with work means less time to write the kind of thoughtful blog posts I want to write, I’m writing a series of updates to reconnect you with my archives. Let me know what you think.
Tweet: Digital reading, reading to improve your writing, & reading the classics—this week’s update.
Tweet: I’ll bet you’ve had the experience of bonding with someone over love of a book or author!
Tweet: We learn so much from reading the work of others that we’d be crazy not to do it.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”