reading nowadays essay

Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

 500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

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Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

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New Stanford study finds reading skills among young students stalled during the pandemic

Stanford researchers find that reading fluency among second- and third-graders in the U.S. is roughly 30 percent behind what would be expected in a typical year.

A study by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) provides new evidence about the pandemic’s impact on learning among students in the earliest grades, showing distinct changes in the growth of basic reading skills during different time periods over the past year.

Ben Domingue (Image credit: Courtesy Graduate School of Education)

Results from a reading assessment given to first- through fourth-graders nationwide show that the students’ development of oral reading fluency – the ability to quickly and accurately read aloud – largely stopped in spring 2020 after the abrupt school closures brought on by COVID-19. Gains in these skills were stronger in fall 2020, but not enough to recoup the loss students experienced in the spring.

“It seems that these students, in general, didn’t develop any reading skills during the spring – growth stalled when schooling was interrupted and remained stagnant through the summer,” said Ben Domingue , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and first author on the study , which was released by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a nonpartisan research network housed at Stanford.

“It picked up in the fall, which is a testament to the work that educators did in preparing for the new school year and their creativity in coming up with ways to teach,” Domingue said. “But that growth was not robust enough to make up for the gaps from the spring.”

Second- and third-graders were most affected, the study found. Overall, students’ reading fluency in second and third grade is now approximately 30 percent behind what would be expected in a typical year.

Reading fluency is fundamental for academic development more broadly, the researchers said, because problems with this skill can interfere with students’ ability to learn other subjects as they make their way through later grades.

“Reading is kind of a gateway to the development of academic skills across all disciplines,” said Domingue. “It’s a key that opens all of the doors. If a kid can’t read effectively by third grade or so, they’re unlikely to be able to access content in their other courses.”

Measuring periodically, not annually

The new study differs from previous research on COVID-19 learning loss in that students’ skills were measured periodically throughout the year, making it possible to assess growth at different stages of the pandemic.

“Most studies on learning loss so far have looked at fall-to-fall changes to show how students have been affected by COVID,” said Domingue. “But just measuring the cumulative effect doesn’t help us understand what was going on between those two time points. There were a lot of changes in what school looked like during different periods between those two points, and it seemed likely there would be some differences in the patterns of learning.”

The study’s focus on students in early elementary grades also distinguishes it from others on learning growth and loss, which typically look at the impact on students in grades 3 through 8 – the ages most often included in annual standardized exams and other routine assessments.

A fundamental skill

The findings were based on data generated by an oral assessment measuring reading fluency in more than 100 school districts nationwide. The reading assessment used in the study takes only a few minutes, and though normally administered in a classroom, it was also conducted remotely during the pandemic. Students were recorded while reading aloud from a device, and their score was based on a combination of human transcription and speech recognition.

The researchers examined trends in the students’ long-run growth back to 2018, observing fairly steady growth until the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The trajectory flattened at that point and remained flat throughout the summer, indicating that children’s reading abilities had stopped. “It was flat in an absolute sense, not just relative to years past,” said Domingue.

Growth resumed in the fall at levels similar to what the researchers saw before the pandemic. But those gains weren’t enough to make up for the ground lost earlier in the year.

The researchers also observed inequitable impact: Students in historically lower-achieving districts (based on data from the Stanford Education Data Archive ) developed reading skills at a slower rate than those in higher-achieving ones. Schools that typically score low on annual standardized tests often serve a greater share of low-income and minority students – populations disproportionately affected by the pandemic in ways that impinge on their readiness to learn, including lack of access to computers, reliable internet access or a parent at home.

“It’s quite likely that lower-achieving schools are dealing with a whole battery of problems that educators in more affluent districts aren’t facing,” said Domingue. “But there was still growth. The teachers were probably moving heaven and earth to help their kids learn to read, and it’s reflected in the gains. But it’s important to recognize the differential impact on students.”

The researchers also found that about 10 percent of students who were tested before the pandemic were not observed in fall 2020. It’s not clear why they were missing, but the researchers suggest that if these students had trouble accessing the assessment remotely, they may be less engaged with school overall and could be falling even further behind than students who were tested.

The researchers caution that, while their analysis provides important evidence on learning loss in the early grades, it doesn’t include information about whether students attended school in person, remotely or in some hybrid form.

They also note that their findings should not be applied to other academic subjects, largely because of the focus on reading in the early grades and the likelihood that it was a centerpiece of many schools’ instruction for the fall of 2020.

While the full extent of COVID-19’s impact on learning won’t be clear for months or even years, this study provides evidence that – after the initial shock of the pandemic –educators found ways to teach and assess young students’ reading skills. And even in the midst of continued uncertainty and disruption, these students were able to achieve gains in the fall similar to pre-pandemic times.

“We can build on this research by identifying practices that accelerate learning for students who’ve fallen behind, and by making sure schools have the resources they need,” said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE and coauthor of the study. “These findings are worrisome, but they do not need to be catastrophic.”

Other co-authors on the study include Jason Yeatman , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and the School of Medicine and David Lang, a GSE doctoral student.

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• Reading is a Good Habit Essay

An Essay On Reading Is A Good Habit

Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing (L-S-R-W) are the four skills of language learning. These are the set of four capabilities that allow an individual to comprehend and use a spoken language for proper and effective interpersonal communication. Reading is considered as one of the best habits anyone can possess. Reading helps a great deal in building our confidence, reduces stress and puts us in a better mood. It also develops our imagination and provides us with a fortune of knowledge. It is rightly said that books are our best friend as reading helps build up our wisdom and thinking capabilities. By developing the habit of reading, one can gain confidence in learning any language. The interest in reading, like any other habit, comes with time. Once a person starts reading, it becomes a part of habit and he/she starts to explore a whole new world.

Reading good books has a plethora of advantages. The habit of reading broadens our horizons and helps us become a better person in life. It also helps in developing a fresh viewpoint of life. The more we read, the more we fall in love with reading. It helps to develop vocabulary and language abilities. Reading is also one of the best ways to reduce anxiety as it provides relaxation and recreation. A book puts us in a better mood and allows us to have a strong imagination. At the end of a hectic and stressful day, all we need is a good book to help us rejuvenate and momentarily escape from the realities of life. 

The habit of reading must be inculcated in children from a young age. Reading is a great habit from the learning point of view as it boosts the understanding of language, improves vocabulary, helps in improving speaking and writing skills, etc. While reading a book, the plot and its characters hover in our imagination. It is said that reading builds imagination power more than any other form of activity. Anyone who has good reading skills shows indication of higher intelligence as reading helps to broaden our wisdom and knowledge to a great extent. It not only boosts our confidence but personality too. 

One of the most beneficial habits one can have is reading. It expands your creativity and provides you with a wealth of information. Reading helps you create confidence and improve your attitude, thus books are your best friend or partner. When you start reading every day, you'll discover a whole new world of information.

When you make it a practice to read every day, you will become addicted to it. Reading can help you develop cognitively and offer you a fresh perspective on life. Good novels can have a great impact on people and lead you down the correct path in life. The more time you spend reading, the more you will fall in love with it. The more time you spend reading, the more you will fall in love with it. Reading can help you improve your vocabulary and linguistic skills. Reading can help you unwind and de-stress.

Reading boosts your creativity and gives you a greater grasp of life. Reading also encourages you to write, and if you do so, you will undoubtedly fall in love with the craft. If you want to create excellent habits in your life, reading should be at the top of your list because it is essential to a person's general growth and development.

Good books will always point you in the right direction. The following are some of the advantages of reading books:

Self-improvement: Reading can help you think more positively. Reading is important because it molds your thinking and provides you with a wealth of information and life lessons. Books will help you have a better understanding of the world around you from a new perspective. It keeps your mind active, healthy, and helps you be more creative.

Communication Skills: Reading increases your vocabulary, enhances your language skills, and improves your communication skills. It teaches you how to be more creative with your thoughts. It not only improves your communication skills, but it also helps you improve your writing skills. In every element of life, effective communication is essential.

Increases your Understanding: Books provide you a foundational understanding of civilizations, customs, the arts, history, geography, health, psychology, and a variety of other topics and elements of life. Books provide an unlimited amount of information and wisdom. 

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book transports you to another world and helps you escape the stresses of everyday life. There are a number of beneficial impacts on your mind, body, and soul that aid with stress relief. It keeps your mind healthy and powerful by stimulating your brain muscles to perform efficiently.

Great Pleasure: Anyone who reads a book for pleasure does so. They delight in reading and gain access to a whole new universe. When you begin reading a book, you will become so engrossed in it that you will not want to put it down until you have finished it.

Enhances your Imagination and Creativity: Reading enhances your imagination and creativity by transporting you to a realm of imagination and, in some ways, increasing your creativity. Reading allows you to examine life from several perspectives. You generate inventive and creative thoughts, visions, and opinions in your mind while reading books. It encourages you to think outside of the box, imagine, and use your imagination.

Enhances your Analytical Abilities: Active reading allows you to gain access to a variety of viewpoints on life. It aids in the analysis of your thoughts and the expression of your opinions. Active reading brings new ideas and thoughts to mind. It activates and alters your brain, allowing you to see things from a different perspective.

Boredom is Lessened: Despite all the other social activities, long-distance travel or a protracted vacation from work can be tedious. In such instances, books come in handy and keep you from being bored.

Reading books adds knowledge and plays a great role in education. Whether it is fiction or nonfiction, we get to learn a great deal from books. It exposes us to the outer world which helps acquire sensibility and understanding of different social subjects. It is therefore very important to develop a good reading habit. We should all read daily for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the wonderful beneficial perks of reading. It is a great happiness to live in a calm place and to enjoy the moments of reading. Reading a good and informative book is one of the most rejuvenating and enthusiastic experiences a person can have. 

One must inculcate the habit of reading. Reading is said to be a great mental exercise. Reading also helps us release boredom. Reading allows us to sleep better. Hence, we must develop the habit of reading books before bedtime. Even in this digital age where any information is just a click away, reading has its own charm. The benefits of reading are irreplaceable as the detailed knowledge it provides is unmatched to anything we read on the internet. Happy reading!

FAQs on Reading is a Good Habit Essay

1. Why is the habit of reading so important?

Reading is important as it develops our thinking capacity and gives important life lessons. Reading molds our personality and makes us a better person. It also enhances our creativity and keeps our minds healthy and active. Reading improves communication and vocabulary skills. Whenever you try to speak in front of everyone, you are unable to speak proper English. This habit of speaking fluent English can only be corrected with the help of reading books regularly and speaking in English with your peers.

2. Why is the habit of reading declining?

The habit of reading is gradually declining. The advent of the internet is often described as the reason behind the changing habits of reading. Nowadays, most people go to the internet for information rather than reading books. The deterioration in reading habits can also lead to a decline in the world’s cultural development. Hence, people should give reading the importance it deserves. Accordingly, people are becoming lazier and not wanting to read as they find it a waste of time. The students nowadays find newspapers to be boring and they perceive mobile applications of new channels to be the ultimate source of news information.

3. What are the difficulties you will face if you don’t read?

If a student is unwilling to read and speak English or any other languages they intend to learn, then he or she will never be able to be creative and innovative in their approach to any other aspect of life. Reading opens up with the mind of the people and leads them to understand the concept of vocabulary and innovation. A lot of students struggle with their vocabulary and grammar. All of this is just done to help the students improve their speaking ability and experience. If you don't read then you won't be able to write good English literature answers in school as you won't be able to manage the content well.

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Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?

By David Denby

A common sight in malls, in pizza parlors, in Starbucks, and wherever else American teens hang out: three or four kids, hooded, gathered around a table, leaning over like monks or druids, their eyes fastened to the smartphones held in front of them. The phones, converging at the center of the table, come close to touching. The teens are making a communion of a sort. Looking at them, you can envy their happiness. You can also find yourself wishing them immersed in a different kind of happiness—in a superb book or a series of books, in the reading obsession itself! You should probably keep on wishing.

It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more _words _than they ever have in the past. But they often read scraps, excerpts, articles, parts of articles, messages, pieces of information from everywhere and from nowhere. It’s likely that they are reading fewer books. Yes, millions of kids have read Harry Potter, “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Hunger Games,” and other fantasy and dystopian fictions; also vampire romance, graphic novels (some very good), young-adult novels (ditto), and convulsively exciting street lit. Yet what happens as they move toward adolescence? When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another. The terror of eye contact! Sherry Turkle, in her recent book “Reclaiming Conversation,” has written about the loss of self that this avoidance creates and also of the peculiar boredom paradoxically produced by the act of constantly fleeing boredom.

If kids are avoiding eye contact, they are avoiding books even more. Work by the Pew Research Center and other outfits have confirmed the testimony of teachers and parents and the evidence of one’s eyes. Few late teen-agers are reading many books. A recent summary of studies cited by Common Sense Media indicates that American teen-agers are less likely to read “for fun” at seventeen than at thirteen. The category of reading “for fun” is itself a little depressing, since it divides reading into duty (for school) and gratification (sitting on a beach towel), as if the two were necessarily opposed. My own observation, after spending a lot of time talking to teen-agers in recent years: reading anything serious has become a chore, like doing the laundry or prepping a meal for a kid brother. Or, if it’s not a chore, it’s just an activity, like swimming or shopping, an activity like any other. It’s not something that runs through the rest of their lives. In sum, reading has lost its privileged status; few kids are ashamed that they’re not doing it much. The notion that you should always have a book  going —that notion, which all real readers share, doesn’t flourish in many kids. Often, they look at you blankly when you ask them what they are reading on their own.

Of course, these kids are very busy. School, homework, sports, jobs, clothes, parents, brothers, sisters, half brothers, half sisters, friendships, love affairs, hanging out, music, and, most of all, screens (TV, Internet, games, texting, Instagramming)—compared with all of that, reading a book is a weak, petulant claimant on their time. Reading frustrates their smartphone sense of being everywhere at once. Suddenly, they are stuck on that page, anchored, moored, and many are glum about it. Being unconnected makes them anxious and even angry. “Books smell like old people,” I heard a student say in New Haven.

Yes, I know: this is not a new story. We have known it since the iPhone was introduced, in 2007. Yet teen-age time on screens, as Turkle has documented, has recently increased to the point where it takes over many young lives altogether. Digital culture has enveloped us more quickly and more thoroughly than most of us had imagined. But what can be done about it? Many adults, overwhelmed by a changed reality, shrug off the problem. You don’t want to become a crank. After all, reading technologies have changed in the past; television altered consciousness and social patterns sixty years ago, and kids survived and became adults. Literature will survive, too,  somehow . Or so we would like to think. (I’m not so sure: the personal gratification provided by constant feedback doesn’t wither as one gets older.) Some of this indifference may be caused by rueful self-acknowledgment on the part of adults. Many of us are looking at screens all the time, too. Even the book lovers, carrying some tome on an airplane, or listening to an audiobook in the car, turn on their phones as soon as they can.

Was it better once? I know perfectly well that there was never a Golden Age of Teen Reading. No more than a minority read, on their own, J. D. Salinger or Joseph Heller or Charlotte Brontë fifty years ago; or Kurt Vonnegut or Ray Bradbury or Allen Ginsberg forty years ago; or science and history. Yet now that minority has grown even smaller—and defensive, too. The celebrated nerds among kids are mostly techies.

Making the case that serious reading is one of life’s great boons—that screen-bound kids are in danger of missing something tremendous—has become awkward, square-headed, emotionally difficult. The plea for beauty and moral complexity may sound merely plaintive. (Few of us are as fierce as the gentle Keats.) Novelists, poets, essayists, and university humanists, emerging from their proud corners, find it hard to talk of character, judgment, perceptiveness, wit, empathy, and other such virtues encouraged by serious reading. They are not salesmen, and they don’t want to sound like William Bennett: such things, they believe, should be self-evident. Earlier ages (the Greeks, the Victorians, etc.) were convinced of the improving value of literature, but in the twentieth century the sophisticated position (Wilde, Nabokov, Updike, Vidal) was always that literature improves nothing, does nothing; it creates only delight. Among famous critics and scholars, Harold Bloom, in book after book, has argued for reading as the way to a developed self, but my guess is that he speaks to those who don’t need convincing. If the rest of us give up on book reading without a fight, we will regret it, even be ashamed as the culture hollows out. I will put it tendentiously. Could a country that had widely read “Huckleberry Finn” have taken Donald J. Trump seriously for a second? Twain’s readers will remember “the king” and “the duke.” They know what a bullying con artist sounds like.

Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.

The Times reported on Monday that at least fifteen state governments were offering some type of bonus or premium for high-demand STEM degrees. “All the people in the world who want to study French literature can do so,” Matt Bevin, the governor of Kentucky, said. “They’re just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayers like engineers will be, for example.” (Governor Bevin, as it turns out, graduated from Washington and Lee with a bachelor’s degree in Japanese and East Asian studies. So much for the crippling effects of the humanities.) But this STEM panic may be nonsense. Business leaders have repeatedly said they want to hire people who can think and judge, follow complicated instructions, understand fellow-workers, stand up and talk in a meeting.

I know that reading literature, history, science, and the rest of the liberal-arts canon helps produce three-dimensional human beings. But how is a taste for such reading created in the first place? Infants held in their parents’ arms, told stories, and read to will not remember the images or the words, but they will likely remember the warmth and comfort associated with books and conversation, especially when the experience is repeated hundreds of times. The luckiest of the children fall out of parents’ arms into preschool. In the good ones, books are read aloud, valued, expounded, held up for kids to enjoy. The rest of American children arrive at school in kindergarten and are then, for thirteen years, either nurtured or betrayed by teachers.

Teachers are the most maligned and ignored professionals in American life. In the humanities, the good ones are as central to our emotional and moral life as priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams. The good ones are not sheepish or silent in defense of literature and history and the rest. They can’t be; the children’s lives are right before them. In high-school English, if the teachers are shrewd and willing to take a few risks, they will try to reach the students where they live emotionally. They will engage, for instance, with “naïve” existential questions (what do I live for?) and also adolescent fascination with “dark” moods and the fear of being engulfed by adult society. Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stevenson, Orwell, Vonnegut, and many others wrote about such things. And if teachers can make books important to kids—and forge the necessary link to pleasure and need—those kids may turn off the screens. At least for a few vital hours.

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By Elizabeth Kolbert

By Rivka Galchen

Friday essay: a real life experiment illuminates the future of books and reading

Lecturer, RMIT University

Independent artist / Lecturer (adjunct), RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Andy Simionato is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, and is a lecturer at the School of Design, RMIT University.

Karen ann Donnachie is founder and editor of Atomic Activity Books, an independent, experimental publishing concern.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Books are always transforming. The book we hold today has arrived through a number of materials (clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, pixels) and forms (tablet, scroll, codex, kindle).

The book can be a tool for communication, reading, entertainment, or learning; an object and a status symbol.

The most recent shift, from print media to digital technology, began around the middle of the 20th century. It culminated in two of the most ambitious projects in the history of the book (at least if we believe the corporate hype): the mass-digitisation of books by Google and the mass-distribution of electronic books by Amazon .

The survival of bookshops and flourishing of libraries (in real life) defies predictions that the “ end of the book ” is near. But even the most militant bibliophile will acknowledge how digital technology has called the “idea” of the book into question, once again.

To explore the potential for human-machine collaboration in reading and writing, we built a machine that makes poetry from the pages of any printed book. Ultimately, this project attempts to imagine the future of the book itself.

A machine to read books

Our custom-coded reading-machine reads and interprets real book pages, to create a new “ illuminated ” book of poetry.

The reading-machine uses Computer Vision and Optical Character Recognition to identify the text on any open book placed under its dual cameras. It then uses Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technology to “read” the text for meaning, in order to select a short poetic combination of words on the page which it saves by digitally erasing all other words on the page.

Armed with this generated verse, the reading-machine searches the internet for an image – often a doodle or meme, which someone has shared and which has been stored in Google Images – to illustrate the poem.

Once every page in the book has been read, interpreted, and illustrated, the system publishes the results using an online printing service. The resulting volume is then added to a growing archive we call The Library of Nonhuman Books .

From the moment our machine completes its reading until the delivery of the book, our automated-art-system proceeds algorithmically – from interpreting and illuminating the poems, to pagination, cover design and finally adding the endmatter. This is all done without human intervention. The algorithm can generate a seemingly infinite number of readings of any book.

The following poems were produced by the reading-machine from popular texts:

deep down men try there he’s large naked she’s even while facing anything.

from E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey

how parties popcorn jukebox bathrooms depressed shrug, yeah? all.

from Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction

Oh and her bedroom bathroom brushing sending it garter too face hell.

from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

My algorithm, my muse

So what does all this have to do with the mass-digitisation of books?

Faced with growing resistance from authors and publishers concerned with Google’s management of copyright, the infoglomerate pivoted away from its primary goal of providing a free corpus of books (a kind of modern day Library of Alexandria ) and towards a more modest index system used for searching inside the books Google had scanned. Google would now serve only short “snippets” of words highlighted on the original page.

Behind the scenes, Google had identified a different use for the texts. Millions of scanned books could be used in a field called Natural Language Processing . NLP allows computers to communicate with people using everyday language rather than code. The books originally scanned for humans were made available to machines for learning, and later imitating, human language.

Algorithmic processes like NLP and Machine Learning hold the promise (or threat) of deferring much of our everyday reading to machines. History has shown that once machines know how to do something, we generally leave them to it . The extent to which we do this will depend on how much we value reading.

If we continue to defer our reading (and writing) to machines, we might make literature with our artificially intelligent counterparts. What will poetry become, with an algorithm as our muse?

We already have clues to this: from the almost obligatory use of emojis or Japanese Kaomoji (顔文字) as visual shorthand for the emotional intent of our digital communication, to the layered meanings of internet memes, to the auto-generation of “ fake news ” stories. These are the image-word hybrids we find in post-literate social media.

To hide a leaf

Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Spiritual Laws

Emerson’s challenge highlights the subjectivity we bring to reading. When we started working on the reading-machine we focused on discovering patterns of words within larger bodies of texts that have always been there, but have remained “hidden in plain sight”. Every attempt by the reading-machine generated new poems, all of them made from words that remained in their original positions on the pages of books.

The notion of a single book consisting of infinite readings is not new. We originally conceived our reading-machine as a way of making a mythical Book of Sand , described by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1975 parable.

Borges’ story is about the narrator’s encounter with an endless book which continuously recombines its words and images. Many have compared this impossible book to the internet of today. Our reading-machine, with the turn of each page of any physical book, calculates combinations of words on that page which, until that moment, have been seen, but not consciously perceived by the reader.

The title of our early version of the work was To Hide a Leaf. It was generated by chance when a prototype of the reading-machine was presented with a page from a book of Borges’ stories. The complete sentence from which the words were taken is:

Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest.

The latent verse our machine attempts to reveal in books also hides in plain sight, like a leaf in a forest; and the idea is also a play on a page being generally referred to as a “leaf of a book”.

Like the Book of Sand, perhaps all books can be seen as combinatorial machines . We believed we could write an algorithm that could unlock new meanings in existing books, using only the text within that book as the key.

Philosopher Boris Groys described the result of the mass-digitisation of the book as Words Without Grammar , suggesting clouds of disconnected words.

Our reading-machine, and the Library of Nonhuman Books it is generating, is an attempt to imagine the book to come after these clouds of “words without grammar”. We have found the results are sometimes comical, often nonsensical, occasionally infuriating and, every now and then, even poetic.

The reading-machine will be on display at the Melbourne Art Book Fair in March and will collect a Tokyo Type Directors Club Award in April. Nonhuman Books are available via Atomic Activity Books .

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Machine learning
• Friday essay
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Benefits of Reading: Positive Impacts for All Ages Everyday

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From apps to social media to Netflix to video games, there are so many ways to fill your free time that it can be hard to decide what to do. It’s also easy to overlook one of the most fulfilling and beneficial pastimes ever created. Let’s look at the main benefits of reading and how you can highlight them to your child.

What are the main benefits of reading books?

Benefits of reading before bed.

• Benefits of reading to children

Benefits of reading out loud

Why is reading important.

• Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits?

What are the benefits of reading fiction?

What are the benefits of reading poetry, it’s a gym for your brain.

The act of reading is a remarkable mental feat and reading comprehension uses a lot of your brain power. When you’re thumbing through a novel you’re building a whole world of people, places and events in your mind and remembering it all as you follow the story. This gives your imagination and memory a thorough workout and strengthens networks in various other parts of your brain too. 💪

If you’re reading a non-fiction book you’re also getting an in-depth experience of a subject full of facts and details that you need to hold in your mind to follow the arguments of the writer. 

It’s well known that your memory improves with use as new memories are created and connected to older ones, making them stronger and easier to recall. Scientists have even found that the other parts of the brain activated by reading can continue to improve days after you’ve stopped reading, meaning even just a little bit of reading can go a long way. 

It improves your focus

From Insta stories to tweets to TikTok videos, information is being packaged into ever smaller chunks and researchers believe our attention spans are getting shorter. However, being able to concentrate on one thing for long periods and ignore distractions is essential for school and for work. Reading is an excellent way to improve your concentration skills and the more you read, the better you’ll be able to focus. 🔍

It expands your vocabulary

Reading expands your vocabulary more than any other activity. A rich vocabulary allows you to understand the world in a more sophisticated way. Reading is also great for your grammar skills and lets you communicate your thoughts and ideas more accurately in all areas of your life. 

It’s an education

Reading is the key to knowledge. Reading non-fiction books means you can learn about any subject you choose in as much detail as you want. Fiction allows you to learn about how other people all over the world live their lives and to put yourself in their shoes. This is a great way to improve your empathy and learn to approach other people with an open mind. 

It helps your problem-solving skills

Reading fiction is also fantastic preparation to learn how to solve various types of problems you may not yet have encountered in your own life. You get the chance to follow the characters through all kinds of situations and find out how they deal with challenges big and small. 

Maybe they make the right choices or maybe they don’t, either way, the writer has put a lot of thought and consideration into their story and you can always learn something from a character’s experiences. 🧩

It’s good therapy

Reading about difficult situations characters or real people experience can be hugely beneficial as well. It can be useful to read both fiction and non-fiction books about something you’re going through. Books can act as a type of therapy and help you to feel less alone in your situation. 

This bibliotherapy has proven effective in helping people deal with issues such as depression or other mood disorders. The NHS even prescribes books to help people through its Reading Well programme! 

Books offer the best value-for-money entertainment anywhere! There’s no expensive equipment to buy, no tickets to pay for and no monthly subscription fee. All you need is a library card for your local branch and you’re good to go! 

Your nearest library probably has tens of thousands of different books available, so you’re sure to find a title to hook you. If they don’t have something in particular you're looking for, you can even ask the librarian to order it from another library. 

Some libraries even offer ebooks on loan which you can add to your ereader or tablet 🏛️

It’ll inspire your child

If your children regularly see you reading you’ll be setting a good example. Children tend to copy what they see their parents do and they’ll soon be joining you storybook in hand for some quiet time you can enjoy together. 

It’s great for stress

It’s not most people’s first idea of a relaxation technique, but reading does an awesome job of helping you manage stress. According to research, reading can lead to a lower heart rate and blood pressure and a calmer mind and just six minutes of reading can bring your stress levels down by more than 66%. 

It helps you live longer!

If you still need another reason to commit yourself to read more, how about this: reading can actually help you live longer! Researchers discovered that those who read for half an hour a day had a 23% chance of living longer than people who didn’t read very much. In fact, readers lived around two years longer than non-readers! 🌳

So, if we’ve convinced you that you and your family need more reading in your lives, when is the best time to do it? Well, reading at bedtime allows you to kill two birds with one stone. 

It helps you get a good night’s sleep

Despite its importance, many of us don’t follow good sleep hygiene and spend the hours before bedtime staring at screens big and small, leading to difficulty falling asleep and affecting the quality of our slumber. The NHS found that one in three of us experience poor sleep. 

Choose to read an actual book before bedtime instead of checking your social media or watching Netflix and you can look forward to a better night’s rest. Reading fiction is a good way of relaxing the body and calming your mind and preparing for bed and has been shown to be as relaxing as meditation. 💤

It calms your child

If you treat your child to story time and read to them just before they go to bed you’ll discover that it’s perfect for calming them down and getting them in the right mood for sleep. As a bonus, they’ll get used to sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a long time.

  Benefits of reading to children

  Children can eventually enjoy all the benefits of reading mentioned above but whether they are too small to read much themselves or they just enjoy listening to you tell them a story, they can get some extra value out of the experience if you read to them regularly yourself. 

It gives them a love of learning

If you start by reading to your child you can get them hooked on books and start a habit that will last them throughout their lives and repay your investment over and over again. Children who learn to read for pleasure will go on to enjoy greater academic success throughout their education according to research. 👩🏽‍🎓

It gives them a head-start

Even if your little one is a toddler who isn’t ready to start reading storybooks by themselves, you can give their literacy skills an early boost and teach them to read by reading to them yourself. They might not understand everything but they’ll pick up enough to get the idea. Let them see the words on the page as you read and encourage them to turn the page when you get to the last word. 

By reading to them you’ll be helping them follow the natural rhythms of language, practise their listening skills and expose them to vocabulary they might not get to hear in their day-to-day lives.  

It brings you together

Time spent reading to your child is a wonderful chance to create some beautiful, cosy, loving memories together and strengthen your bond. It will become something like a regular adventure you and your child can look forward to doing together and will remember all your lives. 👩‍👦

It also gives you lots to talk about later and you can have enjoyable discussions about the characters, plots, dilemmas and mysteries you discover during your reading time. 

Even when your child starts to read for themselves, you don’t need to stop your shared storytime. You can swap it up, with them taking on the role of the reader as you listen or you can take turns reading to each other. 

  You’ve probably been taught that the best method of reading is in silence. However, research has found that quiet reading isn’t actually always the better option and that there are in fact some benefits of reading out loud. 📢

It helps you understand

It turns out that speaking as you read can help you understand texts better. You probably read aloud more than you realise. If you’ve ever received a slightly convoluted message or email or you’ve tried to read confusing legal jargon, you’ve probably found yourself repeating the words out loud to more clearly understand what was meant. ✅

It helps you remember

Or perhaps you’ve tried to memorise a phone number or the lines of a speech and you automatically started to say the information aloud to help you remember. 

Psychologists call this the “production effect” and have discovered that these tactics do actually help people remember things more easily, especially children. 📚

Research from Australia showed that children who were told to read out loud recognized 17% more words compared to children who were asked to read silently. In another study, adults were able to identify 20% more words they had read aloud. 

The theory is that because reading aloud is an active process it makes words more distinctive, and so easier to remember. 🧠

Why read? 

Reading is the most effective way to get information about almost everything and is the key ingredient in learning for school, work and pleasure. On top of this, reading boosts imagination, communication, memory, concentration, and empathy. It also lowers stress levels and leads to a longer life. 

Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits as reading books?

It can be hard to concentrate for a long time and the experience of reading. With a real book you can quickly scan your eyes back over the page to reread what you’ve missed, this isn’t so easy with an audiobook. A psychology study showed that students who read material did 28% better on a test than those who heard the same material as a podcast. 

Reading fiction is a useful way to develop your empathy, social skills and emotional intelligence. Fictional stories allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and see things from various perspectives. In fact, brain scans show that many of the parts of the brain you use to interact with other people are also activated when you’re reading fiction. 

Poetry is the home of the most creative, imaginative and beautiful examples of language and allows you to connect those powerful lines to real emotions all of us feel. Poetry is also efficient and a good poet can reveal deep ideas with a simple phrase. Reading poetry can also inspire your creativity and write some expressive verse of your own! 

Reading is something most of us have been doing all our lives and as a result, we can easily take it for granted, but it’s a great all-around experience for your mind and spirit. So, it's really worth digging out your library card and finding books you and your child can read together. 

If your child is having problems with reading, here at GoStudent we have education experts on standby to give you and them a helping hand in improving their literacy skills or any other learning challenges they need support with. Schedule a free trial lesson with GoStudent today!

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• Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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A for and against essay about the internet.

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Information will soon be so easy to find on the internet that people will not need to remember anything. Do you agree?

Nowadays all the information we could ever need is available online and some people say that means the end of having to learn anything.

It is true that these days everything you want to know is a few clicks away as long as you have internet access. However, not everyone has working internet all the time, for example in certain buildings or remote locations, so we do need to be able to remember information. Moreover, it takes time to look up everything you need to know online, whereas remembering something is immediate. The human memory is a much more efficient system.

Another problem is the quality of the information online. How do we know if it is accurate or reliable? We need to think about other facts we know and remember how to compare information from different websites. Knowing (and remembering) how to find certain information will be more important than knowing the information itself.

Finally, the internet is a good tool but it is not a useful replacement for our brains. If we did not remember anything, we would all spend even more time on our phones and computers than we already do, which is not good for society.

In conclusion, the internet offers us many things but it is still important to use our knowledge and memories. We need our memories to function without the internet and we also need to know how to use the internet properly.

• Read the question carefully. Respond to all ideas in it or all parts of it.
• Plan your ideas first and then choose the best ones.
• Introduce your essay by restating the question in your own words.
• Show understanding of both sides of the argument.
• Use linking words to connect your ideas.
• Draw your conclusion from the main ideas in your essay. Don't introduce new ideas at the end.

What do you think about the question? Would it be better or worse if we never learned anything and just used the internet instead?

Language level

It would be worse. If we only look for information on the internet, for everythingg and every time when we have a question about something we will become ''rusty robots''.

In other words, our minds, without exercising the creativity and memory of our brains, will be almost completly out of purpose. What's more, we will be lazy and with a slow capacity of thinking properly.

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It is evidently known that in recent days, the exchange of information is progressive over the network of various channels which we call it as Internet. Experts have made some definite predictions about the availability of data and information on the above mode of communication in near future. This particular development is totally agreeable. With respect to the technological advancements pertaining to the above, the human life shall be prepared to be compatible with the communication platforms on the network of servers. The key strengths will mainly focus on speed of communication, less errors and information accuracy. This aspect of technological development will eventually replace the traditional modes of information storage. This requires no effort in preservation of information on physical devices as all the core information will be stored in virtual servers. On the other hand, the above paradigm shift in terms of data centralization will certainly replace human brains. This attempt will not trigger any living beings to memorize information physically. It is quite obvious that our brains are limited and restricted with space constraints. Hence, this technology of information storage will drastically replace these drawbacks. Overall, this phenomenal trend of networking has provided a seamless mode of gathering, interpreting and storing information. At the same time, the consequences will be tremendous and noticeable as it will lead to an era where in people across the globe can surf and search their expected piece of data with-in no time. Practically, they don’t have to bother about any challenges related to failure of storage elements. Finally, this pattern of information storage is promisingly going to be accepted.

I think the use of the internet is not only in conflict with learning, but It has made the speed of learning faster and more comfortable.

On the one hand, With the advent of the internet and access to data whenever we want, we were able to free our minds from memorizing a lot of unnecessary data. It caused that instead of spending our time to remember the formulas and data, we use our time for a deeper understanding of the concepts. Concentration on understanding was a big step in order to make us more clear about how to apply scientific concepts practically, and It made the evolutionary process of turning scientific concepts into experimental tests go faster. Going through this evolutionary process quickly, in turn, caused, firstly, the faster growth of modern technologies and, secondly, the creation of many new data, concepts, and sciences. And now the data volume is so much that not only you can never remember or learn them, but you have to choose the best one that works for you. Somehow, the internet has changed how to learn. It has focused on analyzing the options and choosing the best one to learn Instead of memorizing a bunch of content.

On the other hand, Theoretically speaking, One of the laws In the world is that everything can be useful or harmful in turn. This law also applies to the internet. In fact, how to use the internet determines whether it is useful or harmful. Like many other tools that have been invented such as smartphones, smartwatches, electric cars, and so on we have spent time learning how to use them. In order to get the best out of the internet and don't waste our time, we must take the time to learn how to search. The searching skill is the most important one that helps us find better results.

In conclusion, Given the two analyzed reasons above, I agree with the idea that easy access to Information makes people get rid of memorizing lots of data. But this has nothing to do with the quality or quantity of learning.

I think it depends on the type of information. Some information are easier to remember, and hence it's more efficient to have them in memory instead of looking for them online. However, some complex information is offered online, and it will be impractical if we tried to remember it. Additionally, I believe that learning is not just about acquiring knowledge. It's about learning how to think with this knowledge available and solve problems efficiently. That's why the internet is considered a valuable tool to promote learning, not to replace it.

Nowadays we are witnesses how far technology has developed in a short time. A huge of information is backing up on internet and if you have access of surfing you can find any information that you are looking for. However, there are some relevant aspects that should be taking into account when we are talking about using always internet instead of learning. In this sense, the purpose of this essay will be to explain why it is not a good idea. Firstly, as you know, most of the information on internet is fake. For that reason, it is impossible the learning process can be replaced by internet use. If you are looking for reliable information you have to learn how it works. In other words you need of learning even if you want to use internet all the time because you have to discern what of all information is useful for you purpose. For example, if you are a student and want to write an essay about a specific topic you likely have to search for the best information if you want to get a job position or scholarship. Secondly, there is a high demand for professionals who have specific skills in the field that they are pretending to be involved. That’s why learning always is a must for satisfying the requirements of companies and institutions. For instance, in the education field, the main aim is the learning and knowledge which are essential on a daily life to be an expert in your field of action and these skills can’t be acquired through internet surfing. To sum up learning and knowledge are fundamentals in a current world that is demanding professionals highly qualified even in our daily live and the internet is far away of satisfying the required skills that you get every day through the practice, research and networking.

I think it become worse and dangerous for our society, we need to control it making rules. Without internet, many skills and knowledge could´nt be used.

I believe that, The internet become even more dangerous for young people who barely discovered the world around them, If they count on it for seeking information without parental supervision, it would be a disaster!

In nowadays,there are many ways to reach information.The Internet is just one of them but maybe most promising one.The Internet helps us to find information easily and efficently.

However there are some negative sides of Internet.For instance realibilty of information.There are no real control on Internet.I reckon there will not be soon.This reduces the trust in internet.This is why People will always need another source to be make sure and need to remember information.

It is also necesseray for objectivity. You can not just have one source and expect true and impartial information. It is against nature of science.This is not how science works.People must have and process the information.In this way we expand our knowledge.When we make brainstorm we always end up with another information. If we don’t have and process the information how Science works?

I suppose in the future People will never trust completely to Internet. They will always need another source and they will need to interrogate source of information.In conclusion Internet is by far most promising invention People have ever invented.However Internet is not beyond our brain and imagination.We will always need to posses and process the information.

It is about my hometown: My hometown is a beautiful, attractive and cool. N'beika is one of the most famous places in Mauritania where attractive views and economic capacities are in. It is located in Tagant which is in middle of the map. Therefore, It is one the biggest cities in the country. As there are interesting geographical features such as: high Mountains, nice valleys, light hills and wonderful pools. Historically, N'beika played an important role in culture, trade exchange and fighting colonialist. Also it has saved historical landmarks, for example: manuscripts, books and cities which the most important is Gasr Albarka. In the north, there have tourist views and in the East big mountains with lovely valleys like Matmata where there are some Alligators in and other attractive animals. As well as from the south and the west there are some fields, forests and farms. Moreover, people are interested in agriculture, trade, development and education. Furthermore, there are many schools and Mahidras and three colleges providing well-deserved education to students. What's more, mall shops is offering demands and created jobs for unemployment. There are different favourite for people , some of them are crazy about football as youth, and some people like doing agriculture and development. Moreover, there are entrepreneurs doing a small business like selling clothes, pitch, barbershop... etc. In conclusion, N'beika is a gift of Allah that has given to people to spend nice moments in order to feel happy and to invest for everything we want due to gain lots of money .

I believe it is amazing updated technology which has helped us a lot in our lives. In todays era everyone has access to internet over the globe. you can easily find all the information on internet that is required to you. Even though learn many new skills which aren't even taught you from the help of internet. it is good help for book writer like us where we can be part of book writing communities or book writing resources to enhance our skills and provides more guidance to others.

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Reading on Screens Worsens Comprehension for Younger Students. What Can Teachers Do?

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Study after study has shown that reading on screens just doesn’t have the same benefit as reading print books . But where does that leave teachers, who often are required to use both formats in their classrooms?

The question has surfaced again in light of a new metanalysis, published in December , which concluded that digital reading doesn’t provide the same comprehension benefits that print reading does. The paper examined 26 studies of leisure reading in K-12 and university students, published over the past two decades.

For some students, digital reading was actually detrimental: The researchers found that reading on screens lowered reading comprehension skills among younger students, those in elementary and middle school grades.

The results surprised Joe Pizzo, a 7th grade integrated language-arts teacher at Black River Middle School in Chester, N.J., who has been in the classroom for five decades.

“Kids are so connected with electronics. Sometimes they seem to be born with a device in their hands,” Pizzo said. “It’s the connection that they have with the world.”

Still, experts have cautioned that even digital natives—this generation of children who have been exposed to devices since early childhood—may not learn best on screens. Researchers have found that brain activity in regions associated with reading was weaker in children who read less print and engaged in more screen time. (For more on these findings, see this story .)

At the same time, the number of digital devices in classrooms is growing, having expanded in the wake of the pandemic.

Ninety percent of district leaders said that every high school and middle school student in their schools had their own digital learning device in 2021, compared to about two-thirds of district leaders in 2019, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey .

“Digital is not going to go away. We need that in education,” said Cherity Pennington, the library services coordinator in the Shawnee, Okla., schools. “But we also need to give students that opportunity to grow as readers and to experience fiction and nonfiction texts the way they want to for enjoyment.”

‘When they think of their devices, they’re not thinking of reading’

The overall positive connection between digital leisure reading and comprehension in the metanalysis was statistically significant, but small—especially compared to previous analyses of print reading, which show medium effect sizes on comprehension, the authors write.

“In terms of effect sizes, this is basically null,” said Lidia Altamura García, a doctoral student in developmental and educational psychology at the University of Valencia in Spain, and the lead author on the study. Students don’t improve their comprehension skills much by reading digital text.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why reading on screens worsens comprehension skills for younger students, she said.

“It’s a possibility that the children are still learning to read, so they need to consolidate this ability first,” Altamura García said. “It seems that the digital devices are not helping them to learn these skills. But the older students might already have these skills.”

Some educators say that even their older students prefer print books when it comes to reading for pleasure. “In fact, our high school [librarian] this year decided to cut down on the number of e-books that she was ordering, because so many of her students wanted the print format,” Pennington said.

Pennington has heard from her colleagues that students don’t see their phones or computers as a medium for getting lost in a book. “When they think of their devices, they’re not thinking of reading. They’re thinking of school work, or social media if it’s their phone,” she said.

Other teachers have observed students use digital books as a way to skirt reading requirements.

Susan Hess, an English teacher and the department chair at James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Ill., teaches a class with many struggling readers. She makes time for them to do some independent reading of their choice each day, and finds that her students are about evenly split—half choose to read on a device; the other half pick print books.

The kids who choose digital are more likely to get off task, she said. “They can flip between the digital book, and then when I turn around they pull up a game or whatever,” she said.

Digital reading for pleasure vs. in class

Altamura García and her colleagues only examined leisure reading—they didn’t analyze studies of assigned reading for class or homework.

But other research has raised questions about the value of screens in class, she said. The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, a global test of 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, math, and science, also collects information about students’ instructional technology use.

“There are several studies that have found a negative correlation between ICT use in class and values on the test,” Altamura García said, adding that it’s an area ripe for additional research.

Still, the answer isn’t to “just blame screens,” she said. “We need to adopt a multiple approach, with different stakeholders and teachers. Everybody needs to work together to foster reading comprehension. … It’s not only a measure of the medium.”

Educators agreed. Students need to be prepared when digital delivery is the only option, said Pennington, the library services coordinator in Oklahoma.

The district’s libraries can offer resources on recent events, such as news articles or research papers, only in a digital format. “We simply cannot afford to provide that in print,” she said.

As a result, teachers might have to spend time instructing students in how to read an online text, a task that requires “different skills and habits,” said Hess.

Researchers recommend that teachers work together with students to reduce distractions, perhaps by blocking the internet on devices that students use for reading, or putting their phones in another location. Teachers can also encourage students to monitor their own comprehension, setting goals for what they hope to take away from the text. (For more, see this story .)

Other lessons are more logistical, Hess said: How should students organize notes or files in a digital space?

And even digital natives need training in online safety, she added. “You can’t click on every single hyperlink,” Hess said.

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Essay on “Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays.” Throw light on the factors responsible for it and give suggestions for its improvement

Essay – book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays.

Book reading is a dying phenomenon of life nowadays Essay: Books: considered as the best friend of man is seemingly at the death bed. While intellect is on rise with days, the medium to record those and sharing of thoughts has changed in this 21 st Century. Words are increasing, dictionaries are becoming bulkier, but the writings are not necessarily found in the written medium that has been there since ages. While the first printed book was done in China in the 9 th Century called Diamond Sutra containing sacred Buddhist texts, the first mass produced book was the Gutenberg’s Bible. The Bible is till now the most printed book in the world. With so many prints happening each year, why are we saying that book reading is reducing day by day?

Books, and by that I mean physical hard copies have a different feel altogether in terms of deep, sustained engagement with an idea or story. Reading books is both a skill and a habit. New readers feel more lethargic towards reading, but if they manage to continue with the practice, reading becomes a habit. The person feels more and more intrigued and habituated to books and feels like reading about new things and explore more. But according to current trends as seen in the United States of America, book reading has reduced by about 17% than the levels seen in the 1990s. The reason is mostly attributed to the rise of various forms of media. Though traditional news media through television and radio was popular at that time, people mostly from upper and upper middle classes were able to afford the best of those. Even then, these medium offered quite less than what people got from magazines and books, and these also became sorts of memoirs and collections for those who could afford the books on their own. Libraries were seen running on full fledge with people issuing books from all genre, and even came for magazines having information regarding jobs and opportunities.

Keeping aside the books issued for school curriculum, India has also seen reduction of book readers. With the advent of 2000s and beyond, computers and mobiles became more common in households, and so did social media with time. This has become a bane for books and their survival in this competitive world. In the world of TikTok and Instagram reels, a thirty second to one minute video is more of an attention grabber than a book of hundred pages which might take a day or two for a newbie to complete reading. Facebook and blog websites became excellent sites to share anecdotes and important life lessons. Magazines became digital with added footages of favourite stars. E-books are more common than hard copies since they take no extra storage in one’s home.

So the debate continues: is book reading indeed dying or has people changed medium of information gathering? And the answer is that gathering information online is not equivalent to the way a person holds a book in his hands, goes in his own world undistracted from the happenings of the present. He does not feel like scrolling through social media every two minutes. He has more concentration and patience. He processes the information given in the book in his hands without extra external feeding of ideologies. He can have his own thoughts, may be different from the other readers. Also, he is not in the continuous cycle of justifying his thoughts and getting shame on social media. Thus, traditional way of book reading becomes imperative even in this world of information overload.

Book reading as a practice has momentarily revived during the CoViD-19 Pandemic that shook the world. People were idle in their homes and after a few days and months of binge watching videos, turned towards books. Self-help books topped the selling lists. With the world opening up again, we as a society need to promote traditional ways of reading for our betterment. Promoting book clubs, introducing weekly discussions in schools where students share their thoughts on a selected book become excellent ways to revive the process. New learners should take it slow by starting off with short stories and eventually making way to genres they are most interested about.

Also See: How your teacher has influenced your life Essay

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10 books to add to your reading list in April

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Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your April reading list.

April’s book releases cover some difficult topics, including Salman Rushdie discussing his 2022 maiming, Leigh Bardugo’s fiction about the dark arts and Ada Limón’s poetry anthology about our fragile world. However, like April, there is also sunshine: Leif Enger’s wild Great Lakes love story, Helen Tworkov’s beautiful memoir of Buddhism and a collection of the inimitable Maggie Nelson’s essays. Happy reading, happy spring!

I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel By Leif Enger Grove Press: 336 pages, $28 (April 2)

An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger’s latest, which takes place largely on Lake Superior, as a man named Rainy tries to reunite with his beloved wife, Lark. While the world around this couple, a dystopian near-future American where billionaires control everything, could not be bleaker, the author’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist.

The Familiar: A Novel By Leigh Bardugo Flatiron Books: 400 pages, $30 (April 9)

Bardugo departs from novels of dark academia in a standalone to make the hairs on your neck stand up, set in 16th century Spain. A hidden Sephardic Jew and scullery maid named Luzia Cotado matches wits with fellow servant Guillén Santángel. Luzia discovers a secret of Guillén’s, but she’s already fallen in love with him. And because he knows hers, too, they might both avoid the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a gorgeous tale of enchantments both supernatural and earthly.

The Sleepwalkers: A Novel By Scarlett Thomas Simon & Schuster: 304 pages, $28 (April 9)

A couple honeymoons at a Greek resort. What could go wrong? In Thomas’ hands, plenty – especially as the author has never written a comfortable story; her books, from “PopCo ” to “Oligarchy,” crackle with unreliable characters, as well as big philosophical ideas. In this case, the new marriage’s breakdown is chronicled through letters between the spouses, and sometimes bits of ephemera, that ultimately untangle a dark mystery relating to the title.

The Garden: A Novel By Clare Beams Doubleday: 304 pages, $28 (April 10)

Few novels of literary fiction are written as well as “The Garden,” let alone given its sadly relevant retro setting, a 1940s country-estate obstetrical program. Irene Willard walks through its gates having endured five miscarriages; pregnant again, she and her war-veteran husband George desperately hope for a live birth. But as Irene discovers more about the woman who controls all here, Dr. Bishop, she fears carrying to term as much as she once feared pregnancy loss.

Reboot: A Novel By Justin Taylor Pantheon: 304 pages, $28 (April 23)

David Crader, former teen TV heartthrob, just wants to reboot his career when his old show “Rev Beach” has a moment. His life has devolved through substance abuse, divorce and underemployment. But when he and colleagues launch a remake, devolution continues: The protagonist’s struggles are mirrored by climate-change issues, from flooding to wildfires. Despite that darkness, Taylor’s gift for satire might make this a must-read for 2024 beach bags.

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World By Ada Limón (Editor) Milkweed Editions: 176 pages, $25 (April 2)

A wondrous artist herself, Limón is currently poet laureate of the United States, and this anthology is part of her signature project, “You Are Here,” which will also feature poetry as public art in seven national parks. Released in conjunction with the Library of Congress, the collection features 50 previously unpublished poems by luminaries including Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Carl Phillips and Diane Seuss, each focusing on a piece of regional landscape.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations By Maggie Nelson Graywolf Press: 336 pages, $32 (April 2)

While all of the pieces in Nelson’s new book have previously been published elsewhere, they’re made fresh here both through being collected and through their chronological placement. Readers can practically watch Nelson’s incisive mind growing and changing as she speaks with colleagues such as Hilton Als and Judith Butler, or as she writes about queerness, motherhood, violence, the lyrics of Prince and the devastating loss of a friend.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder By Salman Rushdie Random House: 204 pages, $28 (April 16)

On Aug. 12, 2022, the author Salman Rushdie was speaking at upstate New York’s Chautauqua festival when a man rushed the stage and attempted to murder him. Rushdie, a target of Iranian religious leaders since 1989, was permanently injured. In this book, he shares his experience for the first time, having said that this was essential for him to write. In this way, he answers violence with art, once again reminding us all that freedom of expression must be protected.

Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America By Helen Tworkov St. Martin’s Essentials: 336 pages, $29 (April 16)

Tworkov, founder of the magazine Tricycle, chronicles her move from a 1960s young-adult interest in Buddhism to travels through Asia and deep study in the United States of the different strands that follow the Buddha’s teachings. Tworkov mentions luminaries such as the artist Richard Serra, the composer Charles Mingus and the Dalai Lama, but she’s not name-dropping. Instead, she’s strewing fragrant petals from her singular path to mindfulness that may help us find ours.

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War By Erik Larson Crown: 592 pages, $35 (April 30)

Even diehard Civil War aficionados will learn from Larson’s look at the six months between Lincoln’s 1860 election and the surrender of Union troops under Maj. Robert Anderson at Charleston’s Ft. Sumter. Larson details Anderson’s secret Christmas redeployment and explores this individual’s contradictions as a former slave owner who loyally follows Lincoln’s orders. The author also shares first-person perspective from the famous diaries of the upper-class Southerner Mary Chesnut. All together, the book provides a riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult.

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"nowadays" or "currently" to begin an essay?

• Thread starter paddycarol
• Start date Nov 17, 2006

Senior Member

• Nov 17, 2006

SweetSoulSister

I like both sentences, but I wouldn't use them to start my essay. I would rather see something without a comma so soon for the first sentence. Campus marriage has become a growing concern in recent times. It's not incorrect to start with "currently" or "nowadays", but I don't like it. That is just my opinion though. I don't think it is a strict rule.  

I don't think you need an introductory word to introduce such a topic. The sentences will read perfectly well without either currently or nowadays. It can safely be assumed that you are talking about the present unless you say differently. Personally, I suspect any opening like that is hiding an un-supported generalisation. How do you know that people are getting more and more concerned about campus marriage, or that children often prefer watching TV to reading? Who says? The place for words such as this is in the body of the essay when you are drawing comparisons between the past and the present. Incidentally, I have seen the word "nowadays" more often in this forum than ever in my life before. Does it hold a particular fascination for non-native students of English? Is it one of the words that English language courses use to explain some peculiarity of English or English-speakers?  

No problem paddycarol. I agree Pongo Dude! I have also seen that word a ton! Maybe it's the first hit on the Thesaurus. But I rarely use it myself.  

• Nov 18, 2006

Panjandrum wrote:"Incidentally, I have seen the word "nowadays" more often in this forum than ever in my life before. Does it hold a particular fascination for non-native students of English? Is it one of the words that English language courses use to explain some peculiarity of English or English-speakers?" I think that, at least in Spain, "nowadays" is considered by non-native students of English as a "safe", "solid" starting point for a discursive essay. Word order is a nightmare, and an adverb of time gives them a feeling of security...besides it is fascinating to learn that 3 words in our own native language are reduced to 1 in English. On top of that, this word is difficult to spell properly because of the letter "a" in the middle and the "s" at the end, the latter is hard to remember because the translation into Spanish is in singular. Moreover, "nowadays" and "currently" are commonly used to start any discursive essay in our mother tongue, to give a feeling of generalisation. The sentence Campus marriage has become a growing concern in recent times is SO English. Any upper-intermediate student of EFL would have certainly written: "Nowadays, campus marriage is (becoming) an increasing problem". How would you react to that sentence (in terms of language!!)? Is it grammatically correct but not accepted in everyday usage? Would you consider it wrong?  

Moderator: EHL, Arabic, Hebrew, German(-Spanish)

As a first sentence of an essay it would strike me as clumsy and non-native. I would only expect "nowadays" with a comma if you were comparing and contrasting two different time periods. Fifty years ago, campus marriage was not even an issue. Nowadays, it is an increasing problem. (Even that isn't the best writing style, but it's acceptable.) Starting an essay with "nowadays" and a comma is just odd.  

panjandrum said: Incidentally, I have seen the word "nowadays" more often in this forum than ever in my life before. Does it hold a particular fascination for non-native students of English? Is it one of the words that English language courses use to explain some peculiarity of English or English-speakers? Click to expand...

• Nov 19, 2006

Thanks Karmele - that's really interesting. Your comments reinforce the impression I had formed - as indeed do Elroy's and dimcl's comments from a more native perspective. Do non-natives use nowadays more often than natives? Is this an impression I have formed because I don't use it myself? The word has a long and respectable ancestry in English, based on the examples in the OED (earliest is 1397). It also appears in the British National Corpus 1,568 times.  

paddycarol said: Karmele3 said "Moreover, "nowadays" and "currently" are commonly used to start any discursive essay in our mother tongue, to give a feeling of generalisation." Things are the same in China .That's why I felt shocked when I was told it sounded odd to native speakers. Click to expand...

Personally, I suspect any opening like that is hiding an un-supported generalisation. How do you know that people are getting more and more concerned about campus marriage, or that children often prefer watching TV to reading? Who says? Click to expand...

• Nov 23, 2006

To bring this issue back a moment... Everyone has to write this 15-page research project for my religion class at WFU. They have to then send out their papers to the entire class for everyone to read. Here are the first lines of two of these essays: == In this day in age nobody is perfect. == Nowadays when many of us think of the name Confucius, we think of sayings on fortune cookies and a man with a beard. The truth is he was much more than that. == I couldn't believe it when I saw it...someone who goes to a prestigious university actually started an essay with "nowadays." Let it be known, however, that there is very little chance either of these papers gets a good grade. I just felt I had to share this with the viewers of this thread.  

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Mental health care is hard to find, especially for people with Medicare or Medicaid

Rhitu Chatterjee

With rates of suicide and opioid deaths rising in the past decade and children's mental health declared a national emergency , the United States faces an unprecedented mental health crisis. But access to mental health care for a significant portion of Americans — including some of the most vulnerable populations — is extremely limited, according to a new government report released Wednesday.

The report, from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General, finds that Medicare and Medicaid have a dire shortage of mental health care providers.

The report looked at 20 counties with people on Medicaid, traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, which together serve more than 130 million enrollees — more than 40% of the U.S. population, says Meridith Seife , the deputy regional inspector general and the lead author of the report.

Medicaid serves people on low incomes, and Medicare is mainly for people 65 years or older and those who are younger with chronic disabilities.

The report found fewer than five active mental health care providers for every 1,000 enrollees. On average, Medicare Advantage has 4.7 providers per 1,000 enrollees, whereas traditional Medicare has 2.9 providers and Medicaid has 3.1 providers for the same number of enrollees. Some counties fare even worse, with not even a single provider for every 1,000 enrollees.

"When you have so few providers available to see this many enrollees, patients start running into significant problems finding care," says Seife.

The findings are especially troubling given the level of need for mental health care in this population, she says.

"On Medicare, you have 1 in 4 Medicare enrollees who are living with a mental illness," she says. "Yet less than half of those people are receiving treatment."

Among people on Medicaid, 1 in 3 have a mental illness, and 1 in 5 have a substance use disorder. "So the need is tremendous."

The results are "scary" but "not very surprising," says Deborah Steinberg , senior health policy attorney at the nonprofit Legal Action Center. "We know that people in Medicare and Medicaid are often underserved populations, and this is especially true for mental health and substance use disorder care."

Among those individuals able to find and connect with a provider, many see their provider several times a year, according to the report. And many have to drive a long way for their appointments.

"We have roughly 1 in 4 patients that had to travel more than an hour to their appointments, and 1 in 10 had to travel more than an hour and a half each way," notes Seife. Some patients traveled two hours each way for mental health care, she says.

Mental illnesses and substance use disorders are chronic conditions that people need ongoing care for, says Steinberg. "And when they have to travel an hour, more than an hour, for an appointment throughout the year, that becomes unreasonable. It becomes untenable."

"We know that behavioral health workforce shortages are widespread," says Heather Saunders , a senior research manager on the Medicaid team at KFF, the health policy research organization. "This is across all payers, all populations, with about half of the U.S. population living in a workforce shortage."

But as the report found, that's not the whole story for Medicare and Medicaid. Only about a third of mental health care providers in the counties studied see Medicare and Medicaid patients. That means a majority of the workforce doesn't participate in these programs.

This has been well documented in Medicaid, notes Saunders. "Only a fraction" of providers in provider directories see Medicaid patients, she says. "And when they do see Medicaid patients, they often only see a few."

Lower reimbursement rates and a high administrative burden prevent more providers from participating in Medicaid and Medicare, the report notes.

"In the Medicare program, they set a physician fee rate," explains Steinberg. "Then for certain providers, which includes clinical social workers, mental health counselors and marriage and family therapists, they get reimbursed at 75% of that rate."

Medicaid reimbursements for psychiatric services are even lower when compared with Medicare , says Ellen Weber , senior vice president for health initiatives at the Legal Action Center.

"They're baking in those discriminatory standards when they are setting those rates," says Steinberg.

The new report recommends that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) take steps to increase payments to providers and lower administrative requirements. In a statement, CMS said it has responded to those recommendations within the report.

According to research by Saunders and her colleagues at KFF, many states have already started to take action on these fronts to improve participation in Medicaid.

Several have upped their payments to mental health providers. "But the scale of those increases ranged widely across states," says Saunders, "with some states limiting the increase to one provider type or one type of service, but other states having rate increases that were more across the board."

Some states have also tried to simplify and streamline paperwork, she adds. "Making it less complex, making it easier to understand," says Saunders.

But it's too soon to know whether those efforts have made a significant impact on improving access to providers.

CMS has also taken steps to address provider shortages, says Steinberg.

"CMS has tried to increase some of the reimbursement rates without actually fixing that structural problem," says Steinberg. "Trying to add a little bit here and there, but it's not enough, especially when they're only adding a percent to the total rate. It's a really small increase."

The agency has also started covering treatments and providers it didn't use to cover before.

"In 2020, Medicare started covering opioid treatment programs, which is where a lot of folks can go to get medications for their substance use disorder," says Steinberg.

And starting this year, Medicare also covers "mental health counselors, which includes addiction counselors, as well as marriage and family therapists," she adds.

While noteworthy and important, a lot more needs to be done, says Steinberg. "For example, in the substance use disorder space, a lot of addiction counselors do not have a master's degree. And that's one of their requirements to be a counselor in the Medicare program right now."

Removing those stringent requirements and adding other kinds of providers, like peer support specialists, is key to improving access. And the cost of not accessing care is high, she adds.

"Over the past two decades, [in] the older adult population, the number of overdose deaths has increased fourfold — quadrupled," says Steinberg. "So this is affecting people. It is causing deaths. It is causing people to go to the hospital. It increases [health care] costs."

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Guernica editor who published Israeli writer’s coexistence essay resigns

“the magazine stands by its retraction of the work; i do not,” the editor wrote in a post..

Former editor-in-chief disagreed with criticism of the essay

Why Taiwan Was So Prepared for a Powerful Earthquake

Decades of learning from disasters, tightening building codes and increasing public awareness may have helped its people better weather strong quakes.

Search-and-rescue teams recover a body from a leaning building in Hualien, Taiwan. Thanks to improvements in building codes after past earthquakes, many structures withstood Wednesday’s quake. Credit...

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By Chris Buckley ,  Meaghan Tobin and Siyi Zhao

Photographs by Lam Yik Fei

Chris Buckley reported from the city of Hualien, Meaghan Tobin from Taipei, in Taiwan.

• April 4, 2024

When the largest earthquake in Taiwan in half a century struck off its east coast, the buildings in the closest city, Hualien, swayed and rocked. As more than 300 aftershocks rocked the island over the next 24 hours to Thursday morning, the buildings shook again and again.

But for the most part, they stood.

Even the two buildings that suffered the most damage remained largely intact, allowing residents to climb to safety out the windows of upper stories. One of them, the rounded, red brick Uranus Building, which leaned precariously after its first floors collapsed, was mostly drawing curious onlookers.

The building is a reminder of how much Taiwan has prepared for disasters like the magnitude-7.4 earthquake that jolted the island on Wednesday. Perhaps because of improvements in building codes, greater public awareness and highly trained search-and-rescue operations — and, likely, a dose of good luck — the casualty figures were relatively low. By Thursday, 10 people had died and more than 1,000 others were injured. Several dozen were missing.

“Similar level earthquakes in other societies have killed far more people,” said Daniel Aldrich , a director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. Of Taiwan, he added: “And most of these deaths, it seems, have come from rock slides and boulders, rather than building collapses.”

Across the island, rail traffic had resumed by Thursday, including trains to Hualien. Workers who had been stuck in a rock quarry were lifted out by helicopter. Roads were slowly being repaired. Hundreds of people were stranded at a hotel near a national park because of a blocked road, but they were visited by rescuers and medics.

On Thursday in Hualien city, the area around the Uranus Building was sealed off, while construction workers tried to prevent the leaning structure from toppling completely. First they placed three-legged concrete blocks that resembled giant Lego pieces in front of the building, and then they piled dirt and rocks on top of those blocks with excavators.

“We came to see for ourselves how serious it was, why it has tilted,” said Chang Mei-chu, 66, a retiree who rode a scooter with her husband Lai Yung-chi, 72, to the building on Thursday. Mr. Lai said he was a retired builder who used to install power and water pipes in buildings, and so he knew about building standards. The couple’s apartment, near Hualien’s train station, had not been badly damaged, he said.

“I wasn’t worried about our building, because I know they paid attention to earthquake resistance when building it. I watched them pour the cement to make sure,” Mr. Lai said. “There have been improvements. After each earthquake, they raise the standards some more.”

It was possible to walk for city blocks without seeing clear signs of the powerful earthquake. Many buildings remained intact, some of them old and weather-worn; others modern, multistory concrete-and-glass structures. Shops were open, selling coffee, ice cream and betel nuts. Next to the Uranus Building, a popular night market with food stalls offering fried seafood, dumplings and sweets was up and running by Thursday evening.

Earthquakes are unavoidable in Taiwan, which sits on multiple active faults. Decades of work learning from other disasters, implementing strict building codes and increasing public awareness have gone into helping its people weather frequent strong quakes.

Not far from the Uranus Building, for example, officials had inspected a building with cracked pillars and concluded that it was dangerous to stay in. Residents were given 15 minutes to dash inside and retrieve as many belongings as they could. Some ran out with computers, while others threw bags of clothes out of windows onto the street, which was also still littered with broken glass and cement fragments from the quake.

One of its residents, Chen Ching-ming, a preacher at a church next door, said he thought the building might be torn down. He was able to salvage a TV and some bedding, which now sat on the sidewalk, and was preparing to go back in for more. “I’ll lose a lot of valuable things — a fridge, a microwave, a washing machine,” he said. “All gone.”

Requirements for earthquake resistance have been built into Taiwan’s building codes since 1974. In the decades since, the writers of Taiwan’s building code also applied lessons learned from other major earthquakes around the world, including in Mexico and Los Angeles, to strengthen Taiwan’s code.

After more than 2,400 people were killed and at least 10,000 others injured during the Chi-Chi quake of 1999, thousands of buildings built before the quake were reviewed and reinforced. After another strong quake in 2018 in Hualien, the government ordered a new round of building inspections. Since then, multiple updates to the building code have been released.

“We have retrofitted more than 10,000 school buildings in the last 20 years,” said Chung-Che Chou, the director general of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in Taipei.

The government had also helped reinforce private apartment buildings over the past six years by adding new steel braces and increasing column and beam sizes, Dr. Chou said. Not far from the buildings that partially collapsed in Hualien, some of the older buildings that had been retrofitted in this way survived Wednesday’s quake, he said.

The result of all this is that even Taiwan’s tallest skyscrapers can withstand regular seismic jolts. The capital city’s most iconic building, Taipei 101, once the tallest building in the world, was engineered to stand through typhoon winds and frequent quakes. Still, some experts say that more needs to be done to either strengthen or demolish structures that don’t meet standards, and such calls have grown louder in the wake of the latest earthquake.

Taiwan has another major reason to protect its infrastructure: It is home to the majority of production for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest maker of advanced computer chips. The supply chain for electronics from smartphones to cars to fighter jets rests on the output of TSMC’s factories, which make these chips in facilities that cost billions of dollars to build.

The 1999 quake also prompted TSMC to take extra steps to insulate its factories from earthquake damage. The company made major structural adjustments and adopted new technologies like early warning systems. When another large quake struck the southern city of Kaohsiung in February 2016, TSMC’s two nearby factories survived without structural damage.

Taiwan has made strides in its response to disasters, experts say. In the first 24 hours after the quake, rescuers freed hundreds of people who were trapped in cars in between rockfalls on the highway and stranded on mountain ledges in rock quarries.

“After years of hard work on capacity building, the overall performance of the island has improved significantly,” said Bruce Wong, an emergency management consultant in Hong Kong. Taiwan’s rescue teams have come to specialize in complex efforts, he said, and it has also been able to tap the skills of trained volunteers.

Taiwan’s resilience also stems from a strong civil society that is involved in public preparedness for disasters.

Ou Chi-hu, a member of a group of Taiwanese military veterans, was helping distribute water and other supplies at a school that was serving as a shelter for displaced residents in Hualien. He said that people had learned from the 1999 earthquake how to be more prepared.

“They know to shelter in a corner of the room or somewhere else safer,” he said. Many residents also keep a bag of essentials next to their beds, and own fire extinguishers, he added.

Around him, a dozen or so other charities and groups were offering residents food, money, counseling and childcare. The Tzu Chi Foundation, a large Taiwanese Buddhist charity, provided tents for families to use inside the school hall so they could have more privacy. Huang Yu-chi, a disaster relief manager with the foundation, said nonprofits had learned from earlier disasters.

“Now we’re more systematic and have a better idea of disaster prevention,” Mr. Huang said.

Mike Ives contributed reporting from Seoul.

Chris Buckley , the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues. More about Chris Buckley

Meaghan Tobin is a technology correspondent for The Times based in Taipei, covering business and tech stories in Asia with a focus on China. More about Meaghan Tobin

Siyi Zhao is a reporter and researcher who covers news in mainland China for The Times in Seoul. More about Siyi Zhao

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