reading nowadays essay

Teens Today Spend More Time on Digital Media, Less Time Reading

• Technology and Design
• Learning and Memory
• Social Media and Internet

One of every three teenagers has not read a book for pleasure in a year, study says

Read the journal article

• Trends in U.S. Adolescents' Media Use, 1976–2016: The Rise of Digital Media, the Decline of TV, and the (Near) Demise of Print (PDF, 522KB)

WASHINGTON — If you can’t remember the last time you saw a teenager reading a book, newspaper or magazine, you’re not alone. In recent years, less than 20 percent of U.S. teens report reading a book, magazine or newspaper daily for pleasure, while more than 80 percent say they use social media every day, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“Compared with previous generations, teens in the 2010s spent more time online and less time with traditional media, such as books, magazines and television,” said lead author Jean M. Twenge, PhD, author of the book iGen and professor of psychology at San Diego State University. “Time on digital media has displaced time once spent enjoying a book or watching TV.”

The research was published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture ® .

Twenge and her colleagues analyzed data from Monitoring the Future , an ongoing study that surveys a nationally representative sample of approximately 50,000 eighth-, 10th- and 12th-grade students annually. They looked at survey results from 1976 to 2016, representing more than 1 million teenagers. While the study started with only 12th-graders in the 1970s, eighth- and 10th-graders were added in 1991.

Use of digital media increased substantially from 2006 to 2016. Among 12th-graders, internet use during leisure time doubled from one to two hours per day during that period. It also increased 75 percent for 10th graders and 68 percent for eighth-graders. Usage rates and increases were fairly uniform across gender, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, according to Twenge. 

“In the mid-2010s, the average American 12th-grader reported spending approximately two hours a day texting, just over two hours a day on the internet — which included gaming — and just under two hours a day on social media,” said Twenge. “That’s a total of about six hours per day on just three digital media activities during their leisure time.”

In comparison, 10th-graders reported a total of five hours per day and eighth-graders reported four hours per day on those three digital activities. And all that time in the digital world is seriously degrading the time they spend on more traditional media, according to Twenge.

The decline in reading print media was especially steep. In the early 1990s, 33 percent of 10th-graders said they read a newspaper almost every day. By 2016, that number was only 2 percent. In the late 1970s, 60 percent of 12th-graders said they read a book or magazine almost every day; by 2016, only 16 percent did. Twelfth-graders also reported reading two fewer books each year in 2016 compared with 1976, and approximately one-third did not read a book (including e-books) for pleasure in the year prior to the 2016 survey, nearly triple the number reported in the 1970s.

While not quite as drastic, television and movie consumption also declined. In the 1990s, 22 percent of eighth-graders reported watching five or more hours of television per day versus 13 percent in 2016. Twenge said she was surprised that the decline in teens going to the theater to watch a movie only happened recently.

“Blockbuster Video and VCRs didn’t kill going to the movies, but streaming video apparently did,” she said.

The researchers were also surprised at the steep decline in reading. “It's so convenient to read books and magazines on electronic devices like tablets. There's no more going to the mailbox or the bookstore — you just download the magazine issue or book and start reading. Yet reading has still declined precipitously,” said Twenge. 

The findings give Twenge, as a university faculty member, a new perspective on the next generation as they approach college age.

“Think about how difficult it must be to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook when you've been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds. It really highlights the challenges students and faculty both face in the current era,” said Twenge.

“There's no lack of intelligence among young people, but they do have less experience focusing for longer periods of time and reading long-form text, “ she said. “Being able to read long-form text is crucial for understanding complex issues and developing critical thinking skills. Democracies need informed voters and involved citizens who can think through issues, and that might be more difficult for people of all ages now that online information is the norm.”

Article: “Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Media Use, 1976-2016: The Rise of Digital Media, the Decline of TV, and the (Near) Demise of Print,” by Jean Twenge, PhD, Gabrielle Martin, MA, and Brian Spitzberg, PhD, San Diego State University. Psychology of Popular Media Culture , published Aug. 20, 2018.

Jean M. Twenge can be contacted  by email .

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes nearly 115,700 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

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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.

Media Contacts

Carrie Spector, Stanford Graduate School of Education: (650) 724-7384; [email protected]

• 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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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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For thousands of years, reading has been considered a worthy activity and books were and still are highly valued. Books are conduits of individual or collective ideas. This is the reason why, thousands of years ago, some books were praised while others were subject to being burned—often together with their authors. However, nowadays in an ever-accelerating pace of life, people experience a lack of time for such an intellectual activity as reading books—though it is still valued, even if unconsciously. The general populous are content with the raw, cursory stories provided by the television and other mass media (Hobbes 45). In its turn, reading books has been an activity that contributes to personality development and is difficult to overestimate.

I remember one conversation with an acquaintance of mine. This conversation convinced me of the importance of reading, especially for modern youth. As we spoke, he only retold the content of popular TV shows, but he could not keep the conversation on other topics that I tried to start. Suddenly, it turned out he was completely unfamiliar with the works of even the most famous authors in world literature. When I expressed my astonishment about this fact, he answered that he never read books. He said it was a boring and an obsolete occupation. He seemed to be sincerely surprised why someone would want to read a book when there were other ways to receive information such as from the Internet or television.

This case is extreme, but to my mind, it is not too rare among modern youth. When perceiving information that is already processed and digested, one cannot develop crucial traits that reading induces, such as critical thinking, erudition, and imagination (Hobbes 365). Critical thinking is perhaps the most essential faculty of the mind, since it implies the ability to decide what to believe and what to ignore. This skill is especially useful in the modern world where a surplus of information exists. Without critical thinking, a person is more likely to take what they are exposed to for granted. When reading, people start interpersonal communication, constantly analyzing and reflecting on the material, applying it to themselves, and finally forming an opinion towards the comprehended data. At the same time, media often transmits information in a predetermined way, thus impeding individuals from interpreting it (Zaks 126).

Erudition is another key trait a person can develop with the help of reading books. Erudition means extensive knowledge. It is one of the major factors that make people interesting. Erudition helps to establish communication, since an erudite person can keep a conversation on a wide range of topics. Being a polymath also means knowing how to act in unusual situations, or at least implies general familiarity with them. For example, a person fond of reading adventure novels may put on a bold face if lost in the woods, and from the literature they read, they can learn basic knowledge on how to survive in the woods (Zaks 546).

Reading also develops and boosts imagination, which is one of those traits needed in all spheres of life. Imagination is a capability to form sensations even when they are not perceived through the senses. It is a factor of creativity that is closely linked to the ability to prognosticate the consequences of making decisions, developing inventions, or creating art work (Zaks 112). Reading enhances imagination, since a reader has to envisage characters, places, and events depicted in the book. Obviously, television cannot contribute to this skill, since it transmits images that were prepared in advance—hence, depriving one’s mind from mental development.

Based on the aforementioned arguments, the benefits of reading can be easily seen. Its role in the development of an individual can hardly be overestimated. People who have a solid intellectual ability are more intriguing to communicate with, more creative, and they experience little or no difficulties when forming and expressing their own opinions. As for me, I prefer reading to perceiving already processed information. I do not mean that watching TV or browsing the Internet are worthless occupations. On the contrary, valuable and useful information can be found by the means of modern media. It is just a matter of balance. Watching only TV can make you dull and reading too much can make you over-intellectual. Personally, I would recommend that everyone read at least one new book per month and then, after a period of time, evaluate any changes that have occurred in their world outlook. I am sure these shifts will definitely occur and they will be positive.

References:

Hobbes, Curtis. Reading is Not Just Reading . Brisbane: Skylark Bools, 2009. Print.

Zaks, Natasha. Give Yourself to the Book . London: Griffin Press, 2011. Print.

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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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“Teens Today Don’t Read Books Anymore”: A Study of Differences in Interest and Comprehension Based on Reading Modalities: Part 1, Introduction and Methodology

By Jessica E. Moyer, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Are teens really not reading as much as they did in the past? Are teens reading, but in nontraditional formats that are underreported? If surveys focus on book reading, what about teens who do all their reading online or in digital formats? What about teens who listen to audiobooks? If questions are only concerned with literature, how are we counting the many people who read nonfiction, newspapers, magazines, and websites?

Today’s teens may be reading just as much as teens in the past, but their methods and formats of reading are so different from the older generations now creating polls and studies that true levels of adolescent literacy leisure activities are not being captured. One way to address these questions and gain deeper understanding of new ways of reading is to study readers’ preferred formats for reading. Do they prefer print books, e-books, or do they prefer to listen to audiobooks? Can they comprehend at the same level across all formats? Do they comprehend best when reading in their preferred format, or is there a format in which most teens comprehend best? Do teens report being more engaged or interested in leisure reading texts in one format over another? By knowing more about reading format choices and comprehension, self-reports of reading habits will increase validity and the questions can be tailored to reflect new developments in reading generations.

Over the last few years, both popular and scholarly presses have been rife with articles about how kids and young adults, usually defined as people under 40 years of age, are not reading. As a librarian and literacy researcher, I read these articles with great concern–is it really true that kids and young adults are not reading? But as I began to look deeper and review the research as a literacy scholar, I realized that many studies were only counting traditional book and print-based reading, and sometimes were only narrative texts instead of informational texts. The widely publicized 2004 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America , is written up on the NEA website as “literary reading in dramatic decline.” With results indicating “[T]he three youngest groups saw the steepest drops . . . The rate of decline for the youngest adults, those aged 18 to 24, was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population.” 1

A more recent USA Today story from 2007 was headlined, “One in four read no books last year” and noted that those age 50 and older reported higher rates of book reading, as did college educated people and women. Readers who responded to this poll most often reported reading fiction and religious works. 2 Also in 2007, the NEA conducted a follow-up, compendium, and analysis of reading focusing on children called To Read or Not to Read . Results indicated that children and young adults were reading significantly less than in the past. “Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nineteen percent in 1984 to nine percent in 2004. On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.” 3 If nearly all Internet surfing and social networking is text-based, how can this be true? Is this true for today’s teens, or this data more reflective of teens from previous decades with less (or no) Internet access?

Reading on the Rise is the NEA’s latest report on reading, released in January 2009 with great fanfare about the increase in reading, especially among adults ages 18 to 24. What the media hype failed to report was that this survey (once again) only asked about print-based reading, and whether the participants had read a work of literature (such as a novel, book of poetry, or play) in the past year. Nonfiction reading did not count, nor did non-print-based reading. Significantly, the question that did include nonfiction and other types of print-based reading, asking if participants had read any book that was not for work or school in the last year, had results that were unchanged from 2002. 4 By continuing to disregard nonfiction, digital reading, and audiobook listening, the NEA reports show only a slice of the true reading habits of today’s teen readers.

In contrast to the NEA, The Pew Internet and American Life Project is one of the only national organizations to address the digital literacy activities of 21st century teens. The 2004 report, The Internet and Daily Life , addressed leisure readers who read online, but like most of the Pew studies, the results were self-reported, and only five percent of respondents reported doing the majority of their leisure reading online. 5 Has this changed in the last few years? Is it significantly different among teens versus the adult readers of the Pew study? One recent study on teen’s digital literacy activities, Writing, Technology, and Teens , reported that even teens who report high levels of these literacy activities do not consider them to be “real” reading or writing. 6 This attitude is likely responsible for the underreporting of teen leisure reading levels, and it is probable that teens’ dismissive attitude toward digital literacy activities stems from the attitudes and beliefs of their teachers and parents–another indication of the divide between today’s teens and older adults. More support for the role of digital media in teens’ lives ‘ can be found in the 2007 Pew report Teens and Social Media , which reports that 59 percent of teens surveyed regularly participate in online creation activities, from reading, writing, and sharing fan fiction, to reading and posting to blogs, to remixing online music, images, and videos. 7

The Kaiser Family Foundation has conducted similar research to the Pew studies, which was published in the report, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds . This report is a comprehensive overview of the many different kinds of media that are part of the daily lives of youth, from iPods to home computers with internet access (74 percent in 2005) to cell phones and TVs, and the many and rapid changes of the last few years and its effects on the lives of young people. The data in this study is drawn from a nationally representative sample of students ranging from third to twelfth grades, and, like the others, is compiled from a survey that relies on self-reporting and the questions that the researchers think to ask about. 8 For example, they did not think to ask about instant messaging, but results from the 2005 study indicate that it is one of the most popular activities among respondents. 9 A small subsection of the participants filled out media use diaries, which did allow for additional activities to be described, but not soon enough to be part of the larger survey.

Sections of the report break down media use by type, such as TV or computer use. The computer use section is illuminating, as it tracks changes from 1999 to 2004, during which the participants significantly increased time spent on games, web surfing, instant messaging, and overall computer use (from 27 minutes per day to 62 minutes per day). Missing from this section are questions about online reading and use or participation in fan fiction. In terms of overall media use, they found that youth have a ceiling of approximately six to six and a half hours per day to devote to media, and all the different media must compete for that time. This section of the report breaks down overall media use, and here print media (reading) is included. In both 1999 and 2004, amount of time dedicated to print stayed the same, 43 minutes per day. This stability in daily reading time directly contradicts the results reported in the various NEA studies, indicating significant differences in how these results were collected and analyzed. Finally, in comparing heavy uses of media types, they found, for example, that heavy readers are also likely to be heavy TV watchers or computer users, and that heavy use of any one media type is often linked with heavy use of another media type. This matches the results of the Audio Publishers Association annual surveys on audio use, which found that print readers are more likely to be listeners than non-readers. 10

Data Sources

Four data sources will be used to answer the research questions. Each is discussed in detail below. All participants will be 18 to 21 years of age and first-year college students from the psychology subject pool, who are required to participate in two hours of research as part of their psychology course requirements:

• Observational quantitative data–background knowledge surveys, categorical data (sex, age, etc.), ACT scores for reading ability, ranking of formats, self-reports of reading habits, and interests.
• Experimental data–within group and between group contrasts, comprehension scores across formats, interest, and engagement ratings.
• Six to eight purposefully selected case studies representing print readers, digital readers, or listeners–for further exploration of format choices and effects on interest and comprehension.

Each of the three is described in detail below, along with the associated analyses and strategies.

1. Observational Quantitative Data

In order to provide baseline data for each participant and to control for additional variables in the statistical model, several types of observational quantitative data will be collected on each subject.

Prior to the start of data collection, participants will sign a form allowing for the gathering of ACT scores, which are required for all UW-Stout students. The ACT scores will be used as a measure of participants’ reading ability and will either be used as a covariate to account for differences in reading ability or as a blocking variable.

To control for the effects of background knowledge in comprehension, a test of background knowledge will be administered to each participant. This test will be created by the researcher and will consist of yes/no questions asking participants about five to six key ideas associated with each of the reading selections. They will be randomly ordered and written in such a way as not to indicate the actual text.

The first part of the follow-up survey will be a ranking of the three formats: print, e-book, or audiobook. Participants will be asked to rank the formats in terms of their preferred choices for leisure reading and about their experience with each modality. Part 2 will cover all remaining observational quantitative data categories. Categorical data will include their age, sex, race, and level of education. Participants will be asked to complete a series of questions about their regular reading habits: when they read, how often they read, what types of materials they prefer reading, where they get their reading materials, what formats they prefer reading on, if they have types of reading that they only do on certain formats, and their preferred genres for leisure reading.

2. Experimental Data

The second source of data will come from an experiment of formats, interests, engagement, and comprehension. All participants will read three selections from three different texts and on each of the three formats.

All participants will be 18 to 21 years old and first-year female college students from the psychology subject pool, who are required to participate in two hours of research as part of their psychology course requirements. All participants will be female to control for the effects of gender on reading. As reading research shows that men and women have distinctly different interests in reading genres and reading habits, using both sexes at this time would introduce additional complications and potential confounding interactions in the analysis. Using first-year college students allows for the results to be generalized towards older adolescents and young adults, the two age groups singled out in the last two NEA reading studies ( Reading on the Rise 2009; To Read or Not to Read 2007), and the subject of the Kaiser report. 11

To limit ordering effects and ensure counterbalancing, each of the three reading selections will be from different subsets of the mystery genres, such legal thriller, police procedural, and contemporary. Only mysteries will be used so as to best control for the variables of interest and comprehension. Mysteries have been selected because many years of reading research across all ages has shown them to be one of the most popular (along with thrillers and romance) and a genre that is consistently popular with readers of all ages. Unlike romance or science fiction, far fewer readers report hating mysteries or thrillers, thus making them a good choice for this research. As a general rule, mysteries and thrillers also seem to be one of the most socially acceptable genres, especially when compared to romance (trash for housewives) or science fiction (only for super geeks).

Since nonfiction reading creates additional complications surrounding comprehension, background knowledge, disciplinary literacy, etc., no nonfiction reading selections will be included at this time. However, it is recognized that nonfiction reading is a significant leisure reading area, and may account for even more digital reading than print reading. Additionally, as nonfiction is read more often by males, and this study will only include females, it is not possible for it to be included at this time. It is however, along with sex, one of the most important factors to consider in any follow-up studies.

After completing each reading selection, participants will be given a brief measure to rate their interest and engagement with the text, each with five possible responses (Likert scale). Grimshaw et al. used this same type of measure in their study of children’s e-book reading. 12 Next, each participant will complete a Content Reading Inventory (CRI) comprehension measure developed by the researchers. 13 It will be based solely on the selection that was just read and will provide a measure of reading comprehension for that text and format for each participant.

This cycle will be repeated two times so that each participant reads all three formats and all three texts with interest and comprehension measures after each reading.

3. Case Studies

Six to eight participants will be interviewed after the completion of prior data collection. These case studies will be used to gain a deeper understanding of print readers, electronic readers, and/or listeners, as well as for understanding their ranking of formats and how they felt about using each of the formats. The sampling for the cases will be purposive and will be exemplary cases of either print readers, e-readers, listeners or omnivorous readers. The sampling can be described as what Patton refers to as “critical case sampling.” Closely related to typical case sampling, critical case samples are “those that can make a point quite dramatically or are . . . particularly important.” 14 Critical case sampling has been chosen due to the power of the logical generalizations that can be made from studying critical cases. In this project, the critical cases will be those participants who are frequent, heavy readers/listeners, and can be considered representative of their reading type.

All of the case studies interviews will be semi-structured and open-ended. Each will be digitally recorded and transcribed for analysis. Analysis of the transcripts will be done in complement to the quantitative data and will look for themes and categories that represent the previously gathered data, both from the particular participant and the larger group.

The case studies will be used to gain deeper understanding of individual and representative participants in the study. They will be used in the write-up of the data to illustrate data and conclusions from the quantitative experimental and survey sources. They will also be used to frame the entire report to make it more interesting and more readable, providing touches of personal stories to the write-up.

The data described above will be collected in a mixed methods study. This next section will describe each step of the research procedures and note the type or data being collected. Unless otherwise noted, all research will be collected in a single session in a research lab space at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, in Menomonie, WI.

Once recruited, participants will be scheduled for a 90-minute visit to the research lab. Upon arrival, consent and assent forms will be reviewed and signed. The next step will be completion of the background survey, based on the materials in each of the text selections. Before any further data is gathered, participants will be wired for the EDA collection, which will continue throughout the experiment.

Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three groups for the experiment, based on the three-by-three grid in Figure 1 . They will read from a printed book, an e-book on an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, or listen to an audiobook using a Playaway audio playback device.

The Kindle is a self-contained e-book reader designed and sold by Amazon for use with its Kindle format e-books. With more than 700,000 titles available, the Kindle library is one of the largest e-book libraries in existence. The Kindle emulates the print reading experience in several ways; it is the same general size and shape of a trade paperback book (although it is significantly lighter) and the e-ink text is not backlit and thus does not cause eye strain in the way that a computer-based reader does. In many cases, the e-ink is clearer and easier to read than poorly-printed text on thin pages of many mass market paperbacks. When reading on a Kindle, readers “turn the page” by clicking on a button on the side, which refreshes the e-ink to the next page. The Kindle cannot be turned on or off; it only uses battery for refreshing the page and using the built-in wireless connection, which can be used for blog or newspaper reading, as well as for purchasing additional books from Amazon. The Kindle can also play Audible.com and MP3 audiobook files, but this feature will not be used in this study.

Audiobooks will be played using Playaway audios, which are self-contained audiobooks players preloaded with a single title, and are based on MP3 audio players. They have nearly all the same features for listening and are slightly smaller than the current generation of iPod Nanos. Their self-contained nature, needing only batteries and earphones or speakers, makes them ideal for this project. They are also rapidly becoming an important source of audiobook circulation in public libraries.

Participants will read the assigned text and format for each reading time. Before using the audiobooks and e-books, participants will be given a brief demonstration of how they work. After the first reading is completed, they will answer the interest and engagement questions. Then they will complete the Content Reading Inventory comprehension test for their assigned text. This will be repeated twice until all participants have proceeded through all three reading formats.

At this point, the participants will have completed the experimental section of the research project. Before leaving, participants will fill out the general reading questionnaire and be debriefed. They will also be asked if they can be contacted for a follow-up interview.

Part 2 of the data collection is for the case study portion of the research. It will take place sometime after the initial data collection. If possible, it will be conducted soon after experimental data collection to best obtain information about their experiences with the different formats and reading. It will take the form of a semi-structured interview. All interviews will be recorded and transcribed.

A repeated measures ANOVA (analysis of variance) will be used for the main portion of the data analysis. The ACT scores will be used as either a covariate, in which case the analysis will be a repeated measures ANCOVA (analysis of covariance), or as a blocking variable. The independent variable will be format. The dependent variables will be comprehension, interest, and engagement. Nested models will be designed to test for spurious correlations and confounding variables to increase the likelihood that the findings are related to format, not some other variable. The ranking of formats will also be analyzed to see how it might have affected comprehension, interest, or engagement, if at all.

Correlational analyses will be also be done using the data gathered from the questionnaire, focusing on within-group and between differences, such as sex, online computer habits, or self-reported types of reading. The format rankings will also be part of the correlational analyses.

The follow-up interviews will be transcribed and analyzed to determine similarities and differences from the quantitative results. They will be used to further understand and explain the quantitative data, either as supporting cases or as negative cases.

The dissertation write-up, like the data collection, will be a mix of styles. It will incorporate traditional scientific reporting sections like design, methodology, and results for the reporting of the experimental data and the survey data. The experimental results, regression analyses, and the correlations from the survey data will be reported in data displays, likely charts and tables that best represent the quantitative data.

The case studies based on the follow-up interviews will be used throughout the dissertation report. They will be used in the write-up of the data to illustrate data and conclusions from the quantitative experimental and survey sources. They will also be used to frame the entire report to make it more interesting and more readable, providing touches of personal stories to the write-up.

Because this study is about nontraditional methods of reading, like e-book reading and audiobook listening, the actual written dissertation report will also take a nontraditional format. Instead of being a lengthy, word-processed document, it will be written, edited, and disseminated as a wiki, using the free wiki software PBWiki. It is currently housed at http://readingformatchoicesdissertation.pbwiki.com . Copies of all related files, including the proposal, literature review, and theoretical framework are also hosted here for easy accessibility.

By using a wiki as the final product, it will be easily accessible on the Web, allowing for embedded HTML links to different sections of the document and to outside web-based sources, and will allow readers to experience it as a digital text. Most importantly, it will allow for embedding of the digital and audio text selections so that readers of the dissertation can see and experience the different formats of reading. This will also make it easier to provide access to additional data and information, such as the comprehension measure and raw results or the survey data, all of which can easily be housed as a page of the wiki.

While critical case sampling will be used in the data analysis for understanding the variations on reading format choices, typical case sampling may be selectively used in the write-up, as Patton recommends, “In describing a culture or program to people not familiar with the setting studied, it can be helpful to provide a qualitative profile of one or more typical cases.” 15 In the write-up for this project, I will be using some of the case study data to illustrate typical e-readers and typical audiobook listeners, as these are less likely to be familiar to my audience.

• National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America , Research Division Report no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: 2004).
• Associated Press, “ One in Four Read No Books Last Year .” USA Today (August 21, 2007; accessed December 8, 2008).
• National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence , Research Division Report no. 47 (Washington, D.C.: 2007).
• National Endowment for the Arts, Reading on the Rise (Washington, D.C.: 2009).
• Deborah Fallows, The Internet and Daily Life , Pew Internet and American Life Project (Washington, D.C.: 2007).
• Amanda Lenhart, et al., Writing, Technology and Teens , Pew Internet and American Life Project (Washington, D.C.: 2008).
• Amanda Lenhart, et al., Teens and Social Media , Pew Internet and American Life Project (Washington, D.C.: 2007).
• D. F. Roberts, U. G. Foehr, and V. Rideout, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8 to 18 Year Olds ( Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005): 3-4.
• Audio Publishers Association, “ Audio Publishers Association Press Release September 12, 2006: Audio publishing industry continues to grow; shows 4.7% increase in sales: Audiobook sales reach an estimated $871 million ,” 2006; Audio Publishers Association, “ Audio Publishers Association Releases Major Consumer Survey and Announces Increase in Audiobook Usage: Nearly 25% of US Population is Listening to Audiobooks ,” 2006. QY: Access dates? May 7, 2009
• Roberts, Reading on the Rise ; To Read or Not to Read .
• Shirley Grimshaw, Naomi Dungworth, Cliff McKnight, and Anne Morris, “Electronic Books: Children’s Reading and Comprehension,” British Journal of Educational Technology 38:4 (2007): 583-599.
• J. E. Readence, T. W Bean, and R. S. Baldwin, Content Area Literacy: An Integrated Approach (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1995).
• Michael Quinn Patton, Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002): 236-7.
• Patton, 236-7.

About the Author

Jessica E. Moyer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota in literacy education.’  She is the author of Research Based Readers’ Advisory (ALA Editions, 2008) and editor of The Readers’ Advisory Toolkit (ALA Editions, 2010) and Integrated Advisory Services (Libraries Unlimited, 2010)

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Why We Don’t Read, Revisited

A little more than a decade ago, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about American reading habits, which a number of studies then indicated might be in decline. I was worried about what a shift to “secondary orality”—a sociological term for a post-literate culture—might do to America’s politics. “In a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with,” I wrote. I suspected that people might become less inclined to do fact checking on their own; “forced to choose between conflicting stories,” they would “fall back on hunches.”

I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think that I got this part wrong. But I’ve often wondered whether I was right about the underlying trend, too. Were Americans in fact reading less back then? And are they reading even less today? Whenever I happen across a news article on the topic, I wonder if I’m about to find out whether I was Cassandra or Chicken Little.

In assessing reports about reading habits, I keep in mind a couple of lessons from the research that I did a decade ago. First, although American adults seem to get a kick out of worrying about whether American children are reading enough, this is an enormous waste of time in the world in which we happen to live. Children who have any hope of getting into or remaining in the middle class are under great social and economic pressure to excel at academics, and, of all Americans, they are perhaps the least likely to change their reading habits of their own volition. Even the amount of pleasure reading they do seems likely to reflect the social pressure they’re under—not where America in general is headed.

Second, in studies of reading habits, the gold standard is asking participants to report hour by hour how they spent a particular day. It’s pretty much useless to ask how many books somebody read last year, because almost nobody remembers, and many exaggerate, to seem smarter. At the time I wrote my article, the best American data came from a time-use study begun by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2003, statistics that were then still only a few years old, and inconclusive.

In January, however, a Times article about American sleep habits alerted me to the fact that the Department of Labor’s American Time Use Survey is alive, well, and all grownup now. It now has fourteen years of data, series upon series of which is easily accessible through its home page , and also through a Labor Department data portal . Another look at American reading habits seemed timely.

I’ll cut to the chase: between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours. It would seem that reading in America has declined even further in the past decade. But statistics can be tricky, so let’s kick the tires a little.

One hazard of statistics is the contribution of “compositional effects.” Suppose a survey finds that the average American today eats a third fewer French fries than he did a decade ago. Oddly, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that any Americans have changed their French-fry-eating habits. It might be, instead, that the “composition” of the American population has changed. Maybe there are fewer men and more women in America than there used to be, and maybe men tend to eat more French fries. In that case, the average French-fry consumption would drop even if the typical man and the typical woman continued eating a number of French fries no different from the number they had eaten from time immemorial.

It’s possible that a compositional effect explains the decline of reading in America. Maybe, for example, as more women have entered the workforce, their full-time employment has left them with less leisure to read. It’s easy to check such a hypothesis by parsing the data from the American Time Use Survey according to gender . Women read more than men, it turns out, but time spent reading has declined steadily for both genders. If you break down the data according to employment status , meanwhile, you see that the unemployed do read more, but they, part-timers, and full-timers all read steadily less as the decade went forward. The same applies when you break down the data by race and ethnicity or by age ; you see differences in the amount of reading, but a decline is taking place in almost every subgroup.

A less explored cause might be the recession. America’s middle class is shrinking, and the proportion of Americans in the labor force is lower than it has been since the nineteen-seventies. Maybe people read less when they have less money? From a breakdown of reading by income quartile , it turns out that the rich read more—but they read less and less every year. Americans in the lowest income quartile did manage to read more in 2016 than they did in 2003—a rare trend—but that’s probably a dead-cat bounce; the 2003 number was so low that it was as likely to improve as not. All these factors are probably making some contribution to a compositional effect. But nothing, to my eye, looks substantial enough to explain away the over-all trend: Americans are reading less.

To make sense of the data from the American Time Use Survey, it helps to know how they’re collected. A pamphlet explaining the survey is mailed to each subject ahead of the day to be observed. The day after, a survey-taker telephones to ask how the subject spent her time. A subject who doesn’t report any reading may not be a non-reader in any absolute sense. All we know for sure is that she didn’t happen to do any reading on the day under scrutiny.

As a statistic, therefore, the number of average hours spent reading is perhaps less telling than two other statistics: the percentage of the population that did some reading, and the average time that these readers spent on their reading.

Here there’s a little bit of good news: the average American reader spent 1.39 hours reading in 2003, rising to 1.48 hours in 2016. That’s the very gradually rising blue line in the graph above. In other words, the average reading time of all Americans declined not because readers read less but because fewer people were reading at all, a proportion falling from 26.3 per cent of the population in 2003 to 19.5 per cent in 2016. You could call this a compositional effect, but it’s a rather tautological one: reading is in decline because the population is now composed of fewer readers. And the assessment would be a little unfair: we don’t know that the survey’s non-readers are in fact never-readers. All we know is that, when Americans sit down to read, they still typically read for about an hour and a half, but fewer are doing so, or are doing so less often.

It’s beyond my statistical powers (though probably not beyond an expert’s) to figure out whether a decline in an individual’s reading tends to be correlated with a rise in any other activity measured by the American Time Use Survey. I can only offer suggestive comparisons. The activity that the survey calls “socializing and communicating” seems to be shifting in more or less the same way that reading is: those who take part spend about as much time on it as they ever did, but the over-all average of hours per day spent on it is declining because fewer people are taking part.

Perhaps whatever is eating away at reading is also eating away at socializing. More and more people are taking part in “ game playing ” and “ computer use for leisure, excluding games ,” even as the time that devotees spend on the activities holds steady. It’s possible, too, that the numbers may be reflecting a shift in the way that people read news and essays. As best as I can tell from the survey’s coding instructions , reading an e-book and listening to an audiobook both count as “reading.” With computer activity, which would seem to include the use of smartphones, the survey-taker is supposed to “code the activity the respondent did as the primary activity,” which presumably means that reading a newspaper or magazine online would also be classified as “reading.” But “browsing on the internet” is listed in the survey’s official lexicon as an example of “computer use for leisure, excluding games.” So there’s a chance that people who used to read the newspaper in print and be counted as “reading” are now doing so online and being counted as Web surfers.

But, at last, we come to the rival to reading known as television, and find a footprint worthy of a Sasquatch.

Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books. The proportion of the American population that watches TV must have hit a ceiling some time ago; in the years studied by the American Time Use Survey, it’s very stable, at a plateau of about eighty per cent—roughly four times greater than the proportion of Americans who read. But America’s average TV time is still rising, because TV watchers are, incredibly, watching more and more of it, the quantity rising from 3.28 hours in 2003 to 3.45 hours in 2016.

When I was researching my article ten years ago, the sturdiest and most convincing data about reading habits that I found came from a Dutch time-use study, which went back decades. It showed with remorseless detail how television had dethroned reading in the Netherlands between 1955 and 1995. (The data aren’t directly comparable, because the Dutch recorded not hours per day but hours per week, limiting their observations to evenings and weekends.)

These are remarkable curves. I think it’s fair to imagine the trends captured by the American Time Use Survey as an extension rightward, into the twenty-first century, of the lines in the Dutch graph. More than half a century after television’s début, its share of American leisure time is still growing—and reading’s share is still falling. The Dutch researchers Wim Knulst and Gerbert Kraaykamp observed that each generation seems more susceptible to television’s wiles than the generation before it. That observation is confirmed by the American Time Use Survey, which shows that older Americans are more likely to have sat down with a book the day before the survey-taker called.

In the end, the data from the American Time Use Survey paint a fairly grim picture of America’s reading habits. They don’t completely relieve me of my fear of being Chicken Little; it’s possible that the migration of news from print to the digital realm has disguised some reading as mere computer leisure. I suspect, though, that the fraction of such computer use devoted to essays and news is too small to provide much mitigation. The long march to secondary orality seems well under way. The nation, after all, is now led by a man who doesn’t read .

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The Real Reasons Kids Aren’t Reading More

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The time that teenagers and tweens spend on YouTube, TikTok, and other video-sharing sites has taken off during the pandemic, while reading time among those age groups remains flat.

That was one of the key findings of a recent survey by Common Sense Media , a nonprofit research organization.

Media use—defined as everything from reading books to watching videos to scrolling social media—by kids ages 8 to 18 was already on the upswing before the pandemic. But the pace of the acceleration has quickened significantly due to technology-related media use.

Overall media use rose by just 3 percent for tweens (ages 8-12) between 2015 and 2019, and 11 percent for teens, or kids 13 to 18, over the same period. But in just two years—between 2019 and 2021—social media use for both groups increased by 17 percent, to a little more than five and half hours a day for tweens and just over eight and half hours for teens.

The biggest increase came in watching online videos, which grew by 23 minutes per day for teens, and by a minute for tweens.

One survey finding that could be particularly troubling for educators: Only about a third of tweens and one in 5 teens reported spending some time reading for their own pleasure every day, about the same percentages as in 2019.

Yet reading is a key area of concern for schools trying to address the “unfinished learning” that happened during the pandemic.

Students spend seven to 10 hours a day using online media

Overall, boys tend to spend more time using media generally than girls, and Black and Hispanic kids consume more screen media than their white peers. Kids from low-income families entertain themselves using social media and other online content more than those from higher-income families.

White teens spend an average of seven hours and 49 minutes a day consuming screen media for entertainment, compared with a little more than10 hours for Latino youth, and nine hours and 50 minutes for Black teens. And teens whose families earn $100,000 a year or more spent an average of seven hours and 16 minutes on screens per day, about two hours less than teens from families that make less than $35,000 a year.

Nearly a third of teens say that, if forced to choose, YouTube is the one site they couldn’t live without. Another 20 percent of teens picked Snapchat, a social media platform. And nearly one in six—13 percent—selected Instagram or TikTok.

While it may be tempting to conclude that extra time at home during the pandemic was the big reason for the spike in online video watching, TikTok may be at least partly behind that finding, according to the report. “Platforms like TikTok have continued to swell in popularity, and that may also be driving increased use,” the report said.

What’s more, social media usage surged among tweens, with 18 percent saying they use it every day, compared with 13 percent in 2019. That should be a worrying finding, wrote Michael Robb, Common Sense Media’s senior director of research, in an article highlighting the report’s findings .

“Considering tweens aren’t technically allowed to be on social media platforms at all, this growth in use should be concerning for advocates for safe, healthy, social media platforms,” Robb wrote. (Federal data collection laws prohibit kids under age 13 from using social media platforms.)

Surprisingly, the report notes, there wasn’t a big spike in video game usage during the pandemic, even though kids seemingly had more time to play games like Minecraft and Fortnight.

The report’s findings were based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,306 kids ages 8 to 18, conducted Sept. 29 to Oct. 25, 2021. The findings were compared with a similar survey conducted in the spring of 2019.

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Literacy is More than Just Reading and Writing

NCTE 03.23.20 Diversity

From the NCTE Standing Committee on Global Citizenship

This post was written by NCTE member Amber Peterson, a member of the NCTE Standing Committee on Global Citizenship.

“History is written by the victors.” —Unknown

As committee members, we regularly wrestle with pinning down a comprehensive definition of literacy. The common definition, “the ability to read and write,” gets increasingly complex upon closer examination. What does mastery of reading and writing look like? How do we measure it? How do we weigh digital and technological proficiency? Where does numeracy come in? How do the values of our communities and cultural practices come into play? sWhen measuring literacy, which languages and dialects count and which do not?

Despite the complexity, literacy is the global metric we use to assess the health and competence of communities. High literacy rates have been found to correlate to everything from better access to economic opportunity, to better nutrition, to environmental sustainability.

In fact, bolstering global literacy underpins all of UNESCO’s 2030 Sustainability Goals, acknowledging the fact that ideals like gender equality, sustainable infrastructure, and eradicating poverty and hunger are not possible without literate populations. Correspondingly, UNESCO’s hefty definition of literacy is “a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world.” (UNESCO)

This focus on literacy as a tool for meaningful engagement with society makes sense. As our population expands and technology breaks down ever more barriers between us, the ability to communicate and interact with those around us becomes even more important. In our consideration of literacy, however, it is impossible to ignore the myriad ways that imperialist and colonialist systems shape gender and regional disparities in access.

Many historians propose that written language emerged at least in part as a tool for maintaining power. One’s class status dictated one’s access to literacy education, and often those without power were prohibited from learning to read and write at all. Colonialism, imperialism, and the sprawl of anglo-european, male-centered ideology from the 15th Century onward have created global power structures that still dominate today.

When considered from that perspective, it is no surprise that women make up two thirds of the world’s illiterate population, and that sub-Saharan Africa, the region arguably hit hardest by many of those inequitable power structures, has some of the lowest literacy levels in the world.

While our focus must and should be on providing everyone everywhere with the tools to “identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast changing world,” those persistent inequitable power structures dictate that progress will always be lopsided and slow.

As we slog onward, perhaps we also need to examine and consider more closely the world and experience of the “illiterate” as well. Only relatively recently has literacy been expected or even possible for the vast majority of society. For centuries, people have lived, laughed, traded, communicated, and survived without being able to read and write. Even today, though illiteracy can be a literal death sentence (studies have shown that female literacy rates can actually be a predictor of child mortality rates (Saurabh et al)), it is most certainly a metaphorical one wherein the experiences had and contributions made by those so afflicted are devalued both by design and by conceit.

We doom entire cultures and erase the experiences of entire populations by embracing the superiority of those who are literate, but illiteracy doesn’t mean ignorance. We can and should learn from everyone and we must provide other avenues to global citizenship for those who can’t read and write.

So what does this mean for our definition of literacy? At its simplest, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, “We Are Here!”

In my work as the director of program innovation for LitWorld, I get to interact with young people all over the world and examine the idea of literacy from many different angles. Resources for literacy education differ dramatically from one place to another, as do metric taking procedures and general best practices.

What does not change is the inherent drive for people to express themselves, to learn, and to grow. I see the enthusiasm with which young people jump at the chance to share stories of themselves and of the world, to be listened to and to absorb. I also see firsthand the devastating effect of being told that your story, your community, and your culture do not matter. I have witnessed the loss of confidence, the dwindling self-esteem, and the cycle of hopelessness that comes with the silencing of voices.

It is our charge as educators and as global citizens to embrace literacy in ALL of its forms.

5 Suggestions for Embracing Literacy for Global Citizenship in the Classroom

• Focus on students’ own stories . Find ways to center their experiences and lean in to opportunities to share them both informally and formally.
• Embrace ALL of the languages your students speak. Being multilingual is an asset, not a deficit! Many of our students are multilingual in ways we never acknowledge. Mastery of formal and standardized language structures is an important tool that every student deserves access to, but life often happens outside of and around those structures. Those everyday interactions are important, valuable, and valid as well.
• Provide regular access to diverse stories, images, experiences, and perspectives. The world is enormous and that diversity is beautiful. Help your students to see it as such. Providing access to underrepresented narratives and accounts helps to decolonize your classroom and normalize embracing the unfamiliar.
• Place value on reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating in your students’ work. Ensure that reading and writing are not the only ways in which students are acknowledged and celebrated for taking in ideas, expressing their thoughts, or demonstrating understanding. Encouraging multiple modes of expression not only provides more opportunities for students to explore and display their own intelligence, it also primes them to seek information, inspiration, and knowledge from diverse sources.
• Read aloud together, and often . Reading aloud is effective across grade levels, despite the fact that this critical practice usually stops in elementary school. Reading aloud can provide access to content that students might not be able to access on their own. It is also a way of creating community and building a shared experience as a whole class.

The Standing Committee on Global Citizenship works to identify and address issues of broad concern to NCTE members interested in promoting global citizenship and connections across global contexts within the Council and within members’ teaching contexts.

Literacy. (2018, March 19). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://en.unesco.org/themes/literacy

Saurabh, S., Sarkar, S., & Pandey, D. K. (2013). Female Literacy Rate is a Better Predictor of Birth Rate and Infant Mortality Rate in India. Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4649870/

The Sustainable Development Agenda—United Nations Sustainable Development. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2020, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/

12 Reasons Students Don’t Read & What You Can Do About It

Students might see reading as something to do at school rather than an opportunity to be entertained, learn, or be exposed to new ideas.

by Terry Heick

Why don’t students read more?

Digital distractions? No books at home? Too much testing? Kim Kardashian? It depends on the student. It depends on illiteracy vs aliteracy. It depends on how you define reading (does reading long-winded character dialogues in Square Enix games count?) So below, I’ve gathered some of the most common reasons students don’t read and provided some ways you can begin to address that issue.

12 Common Reasons Students Don’t Read & What You Can Do About It

1. They haven’t found the right book or type of book.

How do you feel when your principal drops a book in your lap–something well-intentioned but not even a little naturally interesting to you? Do you hate to read because you don’t want to read it?

Possible solutions: I tell my students that when I walk into a bookstore of 10,000 books, 9200 of them don’t appeal to me. The upside? That means there are 800 books I’m dying to read. No one hates to read. Some of us are just pickier readers than others. We’ve got a collection of books for students who think they don’t like reading , too.

See also What I Tell Students Who Think They Don’t Like To Read

2. They need general reading strategies they can turn to from time to time.

Possible solutions: See here.

Possible solutions: ‘Market’ reading to them. Take pictures of them reading. Start a ‘Caught Reading’ class instagram feed or #caughtreading hashtag (send it to me and I’ll tweet it). Treat it with the same creativity and passion that marketing agencies successfully market billion-dollar companies.

3. They need specific reading strategies they can self-select from based on context.

Possible solutions: Identify their strengths and areas for growth as a reader, help them self-assess in the same way, then work together with them and their parents to create a set of 4-6 reading strategies from the list above (or other) for them to use flexibly depending on what they’re reading.

4. Reading can be intimidating.

Reading is fun–until it isn’t. Do I understand it? What will be on the test? Am I at grade level? Above? Below? What if I have to read out loud?

Possible solutions: Don’t make them read out loud unless what you’re wanting to assess is oral fluency! Don’t put them on the spot. Don’t ask comprehension questions out loud. Don’t always insist that they ‘read on grade level’ (Feel like reading Shakespeare after a long day, or would you rather go home and plop on the couch and watch ‘Bar Rescue’?)

5. The reading space or ‘vibe’ isn’t right.

Too noisy. Too quiet. Too many distractions. Too warm, too cold–we all have circumstances we like to read in. I can’t read if it’s not completely quiet–anyone talking and I’m done.

Possible solutions : Allow students to use white noise apps. Put white noise on in the classroom (they’ll get used to it). Create reading spaces in your classroom. Ask your librarian/media specialist if they have any ideas. Turn the lights down. Buy bean bags–even for high school students!

6. They need a reason to read.

And you assigning it isn’t enough.

Possible solutions: Make reading social. The process, the reflections, and the outcomes. Help them see the value of both the process of reading (critical thinking), and the outcomes of reading (knowledge). Help them see reading as part of the relationship between the life they have and the life they want to have.

7. They have too much else to do.

It’s hard to read if you have a million things to do. Who wants to “enjoy a good book” when you’ve got 20 pages of homework to do?

Possible solutions: Help them create a personalized reading schedule that works for them based on their life.

8. It’s not a habit.

Reading is a muscle. The more they read, the more they’ll want to read.

Possible solutions: They need an at-home library of ‘stuff’ they want to read. Or the Epic reading app .

9. They have problems with phonemic awareness.

If they struggle with phonemic awareness, reading is going to be like climbing a mountain.

Possible solutions: Apps can’t solve every literacy problem, but they’re great for practice. Here are some elementary reading apps that can help. And some apps for struggling readers.

10. They have a limited sight word vocabulary.

Limited sight word vocabulary means slow reading speed, which reduces comprehension and makes reading not fun.

Possible solutions: Use Knowji. Have fun with Frayer Models. Play Vocab games. But more than anything else, help them build a sense of momentum as readers. Encountering words in context is better than on an index card for long-term retention.

11. They struggle with their own identity as a ‘reader.’

These students see reading as something that you do at school, rather than an opportunity to make meaning, be entertained, be exposed to new ideas, make friends, etc. Someone that engineers is called an engineer. Someone that writes is a writer. Someone that reads? That’s called a student.

12. They need to know all of the incredible things about reading–topics, knowledge, genres, authors, etc.

Possible Solutions: So show them.

12 Common Reasons Students Don’t Read & What You Can Do About It; image attribution flickr user eugenekim

Founder & Director of TeachThought

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 .

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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.  

Essay on Newspaper Reading for Students and Children

500+ words essay on newspaper reading.

Newspapers are one of the most important documents. They can be said to be the powerhouse of information. Moreover, they offer us other benefits as well which helps us in our lives. You become better informed through newspaper reading and it also broadens your perspective. However, newspaper reading is becoming a dying habit. As the world is moving towards digitalization , no one really reads the newspaper. At least not the present generation. The readership is maintained mostly because of the older generations only.

Benefits of Newspaper Reading

Newspaper reading is one of the most beneficial habits. It helps us get acquainted with the current affairs of the world. We get to know about the latest happenings through a reliable source. Similarly, we also get an insight into the different domains including politics , cinema, business , sports and many more.

Furthermore, newspaper reading also results in opening doors to new employment opportunities. Reliable companies post their ads in the newspaper for business and employment opportunities so we see how it is a good place to seek jobs.

Furthermore, we can easily promote our brands and products with the help of newspapers. The consumers learn about the latest deals and launch which connects them to businesses.

Most importantly, it also improves the vocabulary and grammar of a person. You can learn new words and rectify your grammar through newspaper reading.

In addition, a person who reads a newspaper can speak fluently on various topics. They can socialize better as they are well aware of the most common topics. Similarly, it also saves us from getting bored. You won’t need any company if you have a newspaper in hand.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Dying Habit

Unfortunately, despite having so many benefits, newspaper reading is becoming a dying habit. As people are getting instant updates on their mobile phones and computer systems, they barely read the newspaper. Moreover, electronic gadgets are more convenient for them so they don’t bother to pick up the newspaper.

Moreover, we see that everything has become very convenient and instant now. You can learn about what is happening in the other part of the world as it is taking place. People do not wait for newspapers anymore, as they feel it only states what they have already been informed about. In addition, they do not wait for the next day to read the newspaper about current affairs , as they get it instantly thanks to the internet.

Most importantly, people are themselves running out of the habit of reading itself. Everything has become so visual now that no one bothers to read newspapers, books, novels or more. The internet has made it worse as now there is a video for everything. People won’t mind watching a five-minute video, but will however not prefer to read a five-minute-long article.

It just shows how we’re becoming so inactive and lazy. Everyone just needs things to be served on a platter. Therefore, we must not let this become a dying habit as newspapers are very reliable sources of news. In the absence of these, there will be hardly anyone left to verify the data and information we’re being fed.

Q.1 How does newspaper reading benefit us?

A.1 Newspaper reading has numerous benefits. It makes us aware of the current affairs and also makes us well-versed. It also kills boredom and enhances our vocabulary and grammar. You can also seek jobs and promotions through newspapers.

Q.2 Why is newspaper reading becoming a dying habit?

A.2 Newspaper reading is becoming a dying habit as the world is moving towards digitalization. You can now get everything on your phones and computers so people are not into newspaper reading as they were before.

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• Why most battery-makers struggle to make money

This is not your classic boom-and-bust cycle

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B oom-and-bust cycles all tend to look the same. A consumer fad or industrial urgency fuels demand for a product. Prices rise. Producers invest in capacity. By the time new supply materialises it outstrips already sated demand. Prices crash. Then, at some point, things get so cheap as to set off another demand upswing. And so on.

The inevitability is comforting for bosses in industries from mining to chipmaking. Not, though, in battery manufacturing. Anticipating booming demand for electric vehicles ( EV s), since 2018 companies around the world have ploughed more than $520bn into battery-making, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a research firm. Sure enough, the investments (plus improvements in technology) have pushed down the prices of batteries and, since these make up a third of the cost of an EV , of battery-powered cars. But not sufficiently to entice motorists to go electric. And so the industry is facing a bust without ever having had much of a boom.

On July 7th SK On, a giant South Korean battery-maker building factories in America to supply Ford and Volkswagen, said it was in a state of “emergency management”. A few days earlier Northvolt, a European rival, announced a strategic review, potentially delaying new factories. LG Energy Solution, another South Korean firm, has paused work on part of a $5.5bn factory in Arizona. Its ratio of capital spending to sales rose from 10% in 2020 to almost 30% in the 12 months to March.

In contrast to more mature businesses with high upfront costs, such as semiconductor manufacturing or shipbuilding, long-term returns on investments in battery-making are hard to predict. The technology is evolving fast. More important, in the absence of historical demand trends, forecasts rely on consultants’ projections of EV uptake.

These appear to have been far too rosy, partly owing to overoptimistic assumptions about just how energetically governments would go about promoting electrification with carrots (such as subsidies for producers and buyers) and sticks (for example, carbon taxes and fuel-economy standards). In the absence of potent policies, carmakers are delaying their electric ambitions. Mercedes-Benz, which had hoped that half the cars it sells will be battery-powered or hybrid next year, has pushed that goal back to 2030.

One way to solve this problem—and turn battery-making into a more normal industry—would be for companies to invest in inventing cheaper batteries rather than making pricier ones at greater scale. Another solution is freer trade. Prices in China, where most of the world’s EV batteries are manufactured nowadays, are down sharply. This helps explain why around one in two new cars sold to Chinese buyers is electric or hybrid, compared with less than one in five in America. In 2023 a benchmark cell manufactured by CATL , China’s battery champion, cost less than half what it did the year before.

Yet these price drops have not spilled over to the rest of the world, where batteries still cost a lot more than in China, according to the International Energy Agency, an official forecaster (see chart). Many countries are putting up barriers to Chinese imports, often in the name of promoting domestic manufacturing. The result is that, outside China, battery-makers have not grown strong enough to stomach a bust—with no immediate boom in sight. ■

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Power drain”

Business July 13th 2024

America’s giant armsmakers are being outgunned, what german business makes of france’s leftward turn, europe’s biggest debt-collector has a debt problem, the ev trade war between china and the west heats up, the ceo’s alternative summer reading list, once high-flying boeing is now a corporate criminal.

From the July 13th 2024 edition

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Paperback Row

6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

By Shreya Chattopadhyay July 5, 2024

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Looking for something new to read? This week’s picks include a Korean cyberpunk novel, a story collection set in Rome and the true story of a rowboat race across the Atlantic.

Here are six paperbacks we recommend →

“When the unit intercom buzzed and the cell door rattled open on its old metal track that morning, Tara breathed a heavy sigh of relief,” starts Lange’s warm novel of family redemption, which follows the 30-year-old woman as she attempts to rebuild her life after prison.

In 1969, two men — “one a flamboyant, attention-seeking playboy, the other a quiet and determined paratrooper,” as our reviewer described them — vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic.

This book, one of The Times’s Best Books of 2023, examines national security via the life of an ex-N.S.A. contractor who was arrested for leaking classified information. It is “about privacy and its absence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai wrote, but also “about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified.”

The nine stories in Lahiri’s newest collection, six of which she translated from Italian herself, explore the city of Rome through encounters between Italians and Romans who hail from other places.

A journalist from Ohio traces the roots of the drug’s peak in the 1980s and 1990s to the white backlash against the civil rights movement, Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and more.

In this novel, the first by the prolific South Korean author to be translated into English, a Korean conglomerate and an armed resistance group clash on a Southeast Asian island where the company has built a space exploration hub.

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