Writes Alexandra Moe, in "We’re All Reading Wrong/To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud" (The Atlantic).
This essay talks about reading out loud to another person and reading aloud when you are alone. There is some discussion of the benefit of listening to another person read to you. You might adopt the practice of taking turns reading aloud with your spouse. There's a brief mention of audiobooks, in the context of saying that you'll remember more of a book if you read it out loud. I can see jumping off into the issue of whether listening to an audiobook is better for your mind than reading silently, but that isn't what this essay is about.
ADDED: After publishing a post, I reread it. That's a risky approach to proofreading, but it's mine. This time, for a change, I read the post out loud. It's annoyingly slower, but I did find one little thing that I wanted to change — "you'll remember more of the book" became "you'll remember more of a book" — that I might not have found reading silently. But this is an additional topic: Reading one's own writing out loud — I think it might give you some perspective. You may become a bit more like an outside reader. Are you more self-critical, reading your own writing out loud, or are you a ridiculous self-admiring ham?
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“A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception.”
—Neil Postman, from The End of Education
https://www.rattle.com/awards/postman/
That jolt you get when a metaphor opens up some new understanding or thought - one of the great things about poetry and poetic language.
AA : "You might adopt the practice of taking turns reading aloud with your spouse."
That's pretty funny.
Until I heard Shakespeare and Byron recited by professors who knew the material it didn’t really come alive. Then learning the slang and double-entendres made the humor richer and more colorful. So I agree with the premise of this article. Imagine how strange the classic PJ O’Rourke articles in Rolling Stone would be if you didn’t understand the context.
“Like a piece of ice on a stove a poem should ride along on its own melting.” ~ Robert Frost
Prose describes. Poetry gestures. The reader/listener must complete the narrative. Thus the mind of the reader is in the poem or there is no poem.
I had to memorize poems in 3-4 grades (what an dreary afterschool memory), and everyone in the class took turns reciting them.
I don't think this was the poem..."Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest —/Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!/Drink and the devil had done for the rest —/Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
In fifth grade, I would have memorized and recited the Gettysburg Address, but my family moved and I went to another school where that was not part of the curriculum.
I wonder what percent of fifth graders today memorize the Gettysburg Address.
About zero I'd guess, at least in public schools.
Here is a good poem to memorize—Good Timber by Douglas Malloch.
Reading aloud to others and singing with others stimulates oxytocin, which is a very important hormone for peri and post menopause women. Higher oxytocin in men increases libido, vasodilation and orgasm while making you be more faithful to your life partner.
Similar results can be obtained by ohmic pranayama breathing exercises.
This may be mediated by vagal nerve stimulation. Other benefits include lower anxiety and depression, improved digestion and lower cortisol.
If you really truly believe that Big Pharma, Big Junk Food and AI social media algorithms are evil, then embrace Bio hacking to take charge of your own well being. It's a truly free market solution that doesn't require someone else to solve people's problems.
A lot to be said for reading, reading aloud, poetry, intelligent oratory. Alas, fMRI is probably bullshit. Recent findings on the brain don't support the idea that one part does one thing.
"You might adopt the practice of taking turns reading aloud with your spouse."
Today’s woman is increasingly unwed.
My sister and her husband regularly read to one another. I occasionally read to my husband, but it doesn't work as well for us.
Choral singing has given me many of the peak emotional experiences of my life.
I listen to long-form podcasts every day while walking the dog - but I can't seem to get into the audiobook thing. I've tried, but I prefer silent reading to myself.
Listening to the written word, only works if the orator knows the content, and delivers it well.
Reading the news to me, is a huge irritation.
I often read to my better half when we’re on a road trip. Not the literary stuff, mind you, but trying answer the mundane questions about what we are seeing like, when and how did they build this bridge? Or, how did this place acquire that name? Or, what does that company produce? Our trips nowadays are akin to journeys through an encyclopedia.
I think the best audiobook narrator I've ever listened to is George Guidall. Especially enjoyed his Vince Flynn books featuring Mitch Rapp.
This rings true to me. There are passages that provoked (and to some extent, still provoke) a strong emotional reaction in me when read or recited aloud, but not when read on the page. E.g.
the thousands of marriages,
lasting a little while longer,
or
Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.
Chaucer read aloud is wonderful. Middle English is easier when you hear it.
One of my favorite memories from high school is my tenth grade English teacher reading Eliot’s “Prufrock” to us. She transformed the poem. The bell rang, but no one moved until she was done.
Second George Guidall as the best narrator. I read once that Elizabeth Taylor loved listening to Richard Burton reading to her.
I suspect reading vs. hearing depends upon ones individual brain. I once could memorize much material by reading through it a couple of times. When just plain ole reading, I could tell you where on a page interesting bits were. Listening to audio books I cannot parse out the clever parts to remember. Still, watching plays is my dearest way. I simply go home and read the script to inscribe the best lines in my mind.
Reading aloud in book group can also enhance and deepen the experience. Last year one of my reading groups studied King Lear over a couple of months, reading many scenes out loud. In different scenes, readers read different characters--at various times I read Edgar, Edmund, Goneril, and Lear. It lifted the text off the page, and introduced us to the experience of acting different roles, but also to the internal emotional and psychic reality of the play's action. A great experience.
Jack and Jill went up the hill...
I had to memorize Ozymandias in school. Never regretted it. It still resonates with me today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2RVgLQV-A
I would never have gotten a tenth of the way through On The Road, much less finished it, if I hadn’t listened to it by a good narrator on audiobook.
You can also read aloud to your spouse the subtitles of a foreign movie on Netflix as she closes her eyes and drifts toward slumber. (Other adjectives may apply.)
I kinda always thought poetry was meant to be read aloud. Otherwise, why follow the rules of meter and rhyme and so on, which dominate the mind when read aloud but which can fail to impress entirely when reading silently.
Althouse's comment about taking turns reading aloud to one's spouse reminds me of an article I read about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I read the article 30 years ago, but this has always stayed with me. When she was first married, she and her husband read aloud to each other from Pepsys' diary. A good diary works very well for reading out loud. Pepsy, Harold Nicholson, all recommended. There is a vividness when a good writer sits down at the end of the day and records and ruminates over the immediate events of that particular day.
Reading aloud can be great, but not everything written is written with the intent to be read aloud. A lot of writing is done to pack as much information as possible into as few of sentences as possible. When read aloud this doesn't necessarily lift the spirits.
'I like doing it this way, so if you're not, you're doing it wrong.'
There's nothing wrong with reciting poetry. There's also nothing wrong with just reading it.
Puffing up about how you do it is just that, puffery.
Imagine the depth of appreciation you'd gain sitting and listening to Fran Drescher recite Shakespeare.
It can also induce a coma.
Weird...
I learned this while still in grade school. I was lucky enough to have multiple teachers who read poetry out loud to the class. But it really hit home in college. Again, I was lucky enough to have a English Lit teacher who read Beowulf out loud in Old English. AMAZING. Never forgot the difference between just reading, which I love, and hearing yourself or someone else recite. As an addendum, The Raven by Poe is an example of something that is not special when just reading, but when reciting, with cadence and feeling, it sends chills through you.
Kate said...
Chaucer read aloud is wonderful. Middle English is easier when you hear it.
True dat. I had a hell of a time reading ME poetry but then started imagining it being said out loud in something like a heavy Scottish accent and all of a sudden it became beautiful.
George Guidall - yes! Garrison Keillor can make his reading of a story or his Lake Wobegon monologues great listening. But his insistence over several decades of dropping several turds of his anti-Republican views has me shaking my head.
Had just moved to a new high school in the middle of my sophomore year and some of the students told me of a senior who not only was the "smartest" person they knew, but had just recited "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", from memory, in his English class. That student, John C., went on to graduate from M.I.T. before it went Woke.
SOME of my work I read aloud, some of the editing I do for others I read aloud, but not always. As to the latter situation, reading aloud allows me to catch errors of mine or of the author. I am on page 347 of a 501 autobiography I am editing and need to crank out 50 more pages today. Bye!
My wife and I don't have the same tastes in reading materials, with very rare exceptions, and even then I can't see us reading aloud to one another. Also, she likes her audiobooks, but I haven't taken to them at all.
OTOH, I always found it helpful to read aloud--if only to myself--my lectures and presentations. Another layer of editing.
I prefer haiku
It is short and to the point
So easy to read
“As an addendum, The Raven by Poe is an example of something that is not special when just reading, but when reciting, with cadence and feeling, it sends chills through you.”
The Simpsons (with James Earl Jones) did it well.
https://youtu.be/bLiXjaPqSyY
"We're all reading wrong" is an incredibly arrogant thing to say.
Everyone reads differently and most people are not good at public speaking. For many people, reading something aloud will actually constrain their perception of it. How many times have you seen a movie, based on a book that you liked, and didn't like it because it wasn't as good as you imagined it in your mind?
Anthony said...
Kate said...
Chaucer read aloud is wonderful. Middle English is easier when you hear it.
Ditto. I started reading the Canterbury Tales out loud when doing my homework and found it was much easier to follow. Remember to pronounce your vowels like they were before the Great Vowel Shift.
My mom thought I was having either a seizure or demonic possession, though.
Shakespeare Original Pronunciation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Reading aloud was considered the normal means of consuming literature in the ancient world. Taking a handwritten work and not expressing it in the open air would have been very strange. It's only with the printing press that reading has become more individualized and private.
There is something very powerful about speaking something written down. In the Bible, Christ is called the Word, and creates the world by speaking.
A pleasure to read this right now, as it is the time of the year when my Chaucer students make their way to my office one by one and recite the first 18 lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. I've been requiring this for the 26 years I've been a professor, and every single student has successfully memorized and recited from "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote to of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende."
I have been told multiple stories of students winning bar bets on the strength of their recitation of these 18 lines (or the first 11 lines of Beowulf), thus demonstrating the falsity of the common assertion that studying medieval literature has no practical value.
We read aloud to the children fanatically. I read LOTR aloud three times, Chronicles of Narnia also. We read different books to them, and often the other parent would listen in, charmed. We got out of the habit as the children grew older, and now seldom do it at all.
I recommend it highly.
Another tedious article. Anytime I hear or read about someone telling me I'm doing some mundane thing wrong I just tune them out.
Joe Smith:
I prefer haiku
It is short and to the point
So easy to read
The fullness of the pale white circle.
The faintest dab of yellow.
No such thing as too many grits.
Some of my students have been passing around a "life hack" that they say helps ADHD students to not only get their assigned reading done but to retain it: They do their reading while simultaneously listening to the audio book at 2x speed. They claim that the combination of visual and audio gives them the focus they need. I have not seen this anywhere in the literature on ADHD, but parents of kids struggling with these issues might want to give it a try.
The professor who taught me Old English, John Miles Foley at the University of Missouri, had us read aloud (and read aloud to us) all the time. He believed that oral / aural learning was easier because heard language went right to the brain's linguistic centers without having to go through visual processing.
It was from him I got the trick of making students memorize a poem in the target language at the very beginning of the semester and having them recite it at the start of every class (I use the first 18 lines of Chaucer's General Prologue for Middle English; Cædmon's Hymn for intro Old English and the first 11 lines of Beowulf for Old English; and two stanzas of Hávamál for Old Norse). A poem gives the students the sounds and rhythms of the language so that when they encounter new words, they have comparisons and guides in their heads rather than just on paper.
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