Why do I read?

I read a post today at the Scholarly Kitchen that triggered some thoughts, not directly related to that post.

Why do people read?

I'm sure there are as many reasons as there are people. But generally, I would say people read for information. Why read directions? Why read traffic signs? (Granted, that's not generally categorized as "reading" in the same way one reads a book or article.) Why read a newspaper/magazine (paper or online version)?

Mainly for information, to feel informed; whether one is or not is another question, depending on the source and the reader's ability to comprehend what is written.

But people also read for entertainment. Why read fiction? Generally to be entertained, unless, of course it is an assigned reading!

But, why else do people read?

Thinking about it, I read for all of the above, but more deeply, I read for character formation. I try to weigh carefully what I intake in the form of media in general, and reading in particular, with a thought to how it will form my character.

We don't realize it most of the time, but what we read (or watch) has a strong impact on who we are and who we are becoming. Even, and I would say especially, fiction. Our guard is down more when we read fiction, so we are more easily influenced without realizing it.

But, nonfiction influences who we are, too. Why do people feel so depressed after doom-scrolling their Twitter/Facebook/RSS/whatever feed? What they read is forming them, whether they realize it or not.

I periodically purge my RSS feed because I tend to subscribe too freely to things that pique my interest. Frequently, after a month or two, I find that what I'm reading on a particular site is having a negative affect on who I want to become, so I purge it. I think that's healthy. I don't want to become closed-minded, so I explore. But, I also want to become someone who reflects Jesus more clearly, so I need to prune some of those explorations.

And that is where discernment comes in. It's too easy to purge something because it makes you uncomfortable. It's also too easy to keep subscribing because it confirms what you want to believe (confirmation bias).

May God grant us wisdom in what we read!

Just an
</idle musing>

Hermeneutics of reading

The act and art of serious reading comport two principal motions of spirit: that of interpretation (hermeneutics) and that of valuation (criticism, aesthetic judgement). The two are strictly inseparable. To interpret is to judge. No decipherment, however philological, however textual in the most technical sense, is value-free. Correspondingly, no critical assessment, no aesthetic commentary is not, at the same time, interpretative. The very word ‘interpretation’, encompassing as it does concepts of explication, of translation and of enactment (as in the interpretation of a dramatic part or musical score), tells us of this manifold interplay.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 25

The primacy of experience—or is it bankruptcy?

Current literacies are diffuse and irreverent. It is no longer a natural motion to turn to a book for oracular guidance. We distrust auctoritas—the commanding script or scripture, the core of the authoritarian in classical authorship—precisely because of immutability. We did not write the book. Even in our most intense penetrative encounter with it is experience at second hand. This is the crux. The legacy of romanticism is one of strenuous solipsism of the development of self out of immediacy. A single credo of vitalist spontaneity leads from Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ outweighs the dusty sum of libraries to the slogan of radical students at the University of Frankfurt in 1968: ‘Let there be no more quotations.’ In both cases the polemic is that of the ‘life of life’ against the ‘life of the letter’, of the primacy of personal experience against the derivativeness of even the most deeply felt of literary emotions. To us, the phrase ‘the book of life’ is a sophistic antinomy or cliché. To Luther, who used it at a decisive point in his version of Revelation and, one suspects, to Chardin’s reader, it was a concrete verity.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 11–12

<idle musing>
And we are the poorer for it. We cast aside thousands of years of aggregate experience as recorded, however imperfectly and stumblingly, in books, scrolls, or tablets for the sake of our tiny little microsecond of experience. And then we wonder why things go awry? Fools we are! Why reinvent the wheel all the time; we might just as well be illiterate. Ah, but we are! We may know how to read, but we haven't a clue on what to read or how to read well. We skim and call it reading. We rarely actually read, but when we do, we call it "close reading" or "deep reading" so that people will think some amazing thing is happening. Our predecessors would laugh at us. Hopefully, if we have successors (which is looking less and less likely with each rise in temperature), they too will laugh at us. Heaven knows we deserve it!
</idle musing>

Keep this in mind when reading

Reading usually proceeds from a written record. The written record of [Ta], however, is obviously not quite identical with [Ta] itself, since most writing systems, the Hebrew script included, only partially encode the information by which texts are determined. Therefore, in order to retrieve a text from a given written document, the reader is expected and required to provide additional information not found in the written record, but to be drawn from his own experience and cultural knowledge. If a specific reader is fully aware of the cultural codes and horizons of [Ta], he might be able to supply the necessary details and to apply them on the written document in the way required to (re-)create [Ta(1)] as a full equivalent of the original [Ta]. If this is not the case, however, he is likely to produce [Tb] in a way only partially compliant with [Ta].

This problem, inherent to script and the written transmission of documents in general as mentioned before, seems to have been even more grave with regard to the Hebrew Bible. The reason is that the Hebrew script is not able to record vowels, with the exception of the so-called vowel letters (matres lectionis), although the distinctiveness of a certain vocalization may carry important semantic information. As a result, the Hebrew Bible contains in fact a large number of words with different meaning, which had been homographs before the invention of the Masoretic pointing.—Stefan Schorch in Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism, edited by Raymond F. Person, Jr. and Robert Rezetko, forthcoming from SBL Press

Learning: easy and fun!

It is because children learn continuously and effortlessly that adults generally fail to give them credit for the amount of learning that they do. It is a common adult belief that learning is a difficult and even painful activity, that it involves grappling with something that you don’t understand, and therefore necessarily leaves marks of effort and strain. But in fact, the sight of a child struggling to learn is a clear sign that learning is not taking place, that the child is confronted by something incomprehensible. When learning does occur, it is inconspicious.—Understanding Reading, page 202

<idle musing>
I agree. When I was teaching High School Latin, a sure sign they weren't getting it was when they looked like they were trying too hard.

That's the end of that book, by the way. Not sure what I'll excerpt from next. Maybe I'll just stick to one book/post in a day for a while. The cabins are starting to pick up as Memorial Day approaches and I'm editing a couple of books and working part-time for Eisenbrauns. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for reading for leisure—and then typing in the excerpts for your dining and listening pleasure. But, we'll see. I've got some great books that are begging for me to read them...
</idle musing>

How do they learn?

Children learn by relating their understanding of the new to what they know already, modifying or elaborating their prior knowledge. Learning is continuous and completely natural, and it is not necessary to propose separate “processes” of motivation and reinforcement to sustain and consolidate learning (nor should it be necessary for teachers to regard incentives and rewards as separate concerns that can be grafted onto reading instruction). Children may not always find it easy or even necessary to learn what we try to teach them, but they find the state of not learning anything intolerable.—Understanding Reading, page 194

Not so much can, as will

One of the great tragedies of contemporary education is not so much that many students leave school unable to read and to write, but that many graduate with an antipathy to reading and writing, despite the abilities they might have.—Understanding Reading, page 191

<idle musing>
Amen! Good preaching! Kids are born with a natural curiosity—and it takes twelve years of school to destroy it! Maybe if we didn't try so hard to kill the curiosity, but instead cultivated it, we might have more adults who enjoy reading? Just an
</idle musing>

Want to be smarter? Read more!

Experience always results in learning. Experience in reading leads to more knowledge about reading itself. Not surprisingly, students who read a lot tend to read better (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). They don’t need to read better in order to read a lot, but the more they read, the more they learn about reading. The same researchers reported that students who read more also tended to have larger vocabularies, better comprehension, and generally did better on a range of academic subjects. In other words, reading makes people smarter.—Understanding Reading, page 190

We're all beginners

A distinction is often drawn between fluent reading and beginning reading to contrast the virtuosos manner in which experienced readers are supposed to read with the stumbling, less proficient behavior of learners. But the distinction isn’t valid. It’s usually possible to find something than any beginning reader can read easily, even if only one word. And it’s always possible to find something an experienced reader can’t read without difficulty. The advantage of an experienced reader over a neophyte lies in familiarity with a range of different kinds of text, not in the possession of skills that facilitate every kind of reading.—Understanding Reading, page 188

Reading aloud, again...

In reading aloud, for our own purposes or to other people, an extra step is required. First we have to understand what we are reading, then we have to say what we understand. We don’t transform the uninterpreted words (or their component letters) into sound; we put sound to the words that we have interpreted. We do this in exactly the same way that we identify the dog that we see jumping the fence. We don’t say “There’s a dog,” and then understand that it is a dog that we have seen. We recognize a dog, and then say the word that we have for animals that we recognize as dogs.—Understanding Reading, page 173

How do you learn to read?

Let me summarize every thing I have just said: Children learn to read by reading.—Understanding Reading, page 169

<idle musing>
That seems redundant, doesn't it? But it's true nonetheless. How do you learn a language? By using it! How do you learn anything, really? By doing it.

So, in the immortal words of Augustine, "Tolle! Lege!" Pick it up and read it!
</idle musing>

Subvocalization

There is a general tendency to subvocalize when reading becomes difficult, when we can predict less.—Understanding Reading, page 167

<idle musing>
I hadn't really thought about it before, but it is true. Now that I think about it, I remember sitting in a graduate seminar and the professor was referring to a German reference work. He didn't just subvocalize it, he muttered it as he was trying to figure out exactly what they were saying—mind you, this was about a text in an ancient language that we were all struggling with, so it wasn't the German that was tripping him up, it was the ancient language :)
</idle musing>

More on reading aloud

According to Huey (1908), instruction at the beginning of the 20th century placed oral reading long after silent. Currently the trend is the reverse. Huey was critical of any emphasis on reading aloud, which he considered much more difficult and unnatural than reading silently (p. 359). He considered “reading aloud” the opposite of “reading for thought.”—Understanding Reading, page 166

<idle musing>
Another nail in the coffin of "the ancients couldn't read silently." Personally, I find it difficult to remember what I'm reading when I read it aloud. I have to read it silently first, then aloud. Sometimes, I'll be reading something aloud to Debbie and then stop in midsentence; it drives her nuts—and it would drive me nuts, too, if somebody did it to me!
</idle musing>

Meaning and words

We must get used to the notion that meaning is not dependent on specific words. This crucial point is elaborated many times in this book. When we retain a meaningful sequence of words in memory—either short-term or long-term—we are not primarily remembering the string the words at all but rather the meaning that we attribute to them.—Understanding Reading, page 105

<idle musing>
Indeed. How many times can you clearly remember a concept but can't recall the words? They seem to be right there on the tip of your tongue, but you can't pull them up to speak them. Yet you still understand the concept completely. Or you relay an idea with your own words, even though you wish you could recall the words the author used. That's what he's talking about here.
</idle musing>

Study advice

There are a number of paradoxes about the role of memory in reading. The more we try to memorize, the less we are likely to recall. The more we try to memorize, the less we are likely to comprehend, which not only makes recall more difficult—it makes recall pointless. Who wants to remember nonsense? On the other hand, the more we comprehend, the more memory will take care of itself.—Understanding Reading, page 96

<idle musing>
I never was big on memorizing things (except vocabulary in languages!). Of course, that's why I always did poorly on fill-in-the-blank tests. But, I always aced essay, multiple choice, and T/F exams. I strove to understand what I was reading, but not necessarily the exact wording of it...

Now, what does all this say about the way we should be teaching?
</idle musing>

Want to be right more often? Then be prepared to be wrong

Signal detection theory, however, shows that the cost of increasing the proportion of correct responses will be an increase in the number of errors. In other words, the more often you want to be right, the more often you must tolerate being wrong.—Understanding Reading, page 66

This is the opposite of what I thought

Absence of uncertainty is not a condition that we tolerate for very long; we find it boring. There is no “experience” to it. We seek uncertainty, provided we can keep it under control and clear of confusion. We comprehend when we can “make sense” of experience.—Understanding Reading, page 60

<idle musing>
Interesting, isn't it? I was always told that we want certainty—that uncertainty was intolerable to us; we want to be in control. But, when I stop to think about it, he's correct. Mind the caveat, though, "provided we can keep it under control and clear of confusion."

Now, transpose that to children. We don't need to motivate them to learn. They want to learn. We just need to keep from destroying that desire—not an easy task in the classroom, is it? I am extremely thankful that I read many of the required texts in high school before I took the classes. I would never have liked the books if that were my first exposure to them! Isn't that a sad commentary?
</idle musing>

Unconscious assumptions

Genre schemes help both readers and writers. Their characteristic forms help readers by giving them a basis for predicting what a text will be like, that a novel will be constructed in a particular way, that a scientific article will follow a certain format, that a letter will observe typical conventions. Readers become so accustomed to the genre schemes of the texts with which they are familiar that they assume they are natural, inevitable, and universal. A text that is produced differently in a different culture may be regarded as odd.—Understanding Reading, page 46

<idle musing>
Indeed! That's part of our problem in reading the Bible. We assume, subconsciously, that the genres with which we are familiar are the same as the ancient ones. This is most pronounced in the Old Testament, but also in relevant to the New Testament. Their genre schemata are different from ours, and only by carefully reading what is written—and not what we think is written—can we uncover what they are trying to say.

From a strictly secular point, this is difficult. But, as a Christian, I believe that the Holy Spirit is able to give us insight. Sometimes it's a flash of inspiration, but usually it is the result of prayerful, careful reading. I've found that the lexicon makes a good devotional : )
</idle musing>

tolle! lege!

Reading aloud is more complex, and therefore more demanding, than silent reading.—Understanding Reading, page 34

Metaphors really do matter—a lot

The metaphorical nature of terms like scheme and script is often overlooked. The use of computers as an analogy for the brain in educational theorizing has led to a belief that schemes, scripts, and cognitive structure itself are “data” or “programs” that people must “acquire” through instruction. The alternative view is that the distillation of experience into forms that might be conceptualized as schemes or scripts is natural for humans of any age.—Understanding Reading, pages 29–30

<idle musing>
I'm noticing this in most of the linguistics books I've been reading lately. They all treat the brain—and by extension, the person—as a machine, a large and very complicated computer. If we can just figure out the correct program, everything will make sense. Except that people aren't logical and rational...so, metaphors do matter.
</idle musing>