Slow reading
Encyclopedia
Slow reading is the intentional reduction in the speed of reading
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...

, carried out to increase comprehension or pleasure. The concept appears to have originated in the study of philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

 as a technique to more fully comprehend and appreciate a complex text
Text (literary theory)
A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...

. More recently, there has been increased interest in slow reading as result of the slow movement
Slow Movement
The Slow Movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the Slow Food organization...

 and its focus on decelerating the pace of modern life.

Related terms

The use of slow reading in literary criticism is sometimes referred to as close reading
Close reading
Close reading describes, in literary criticism, the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they...

. Of less common usage is the term, "deep reading" (Birkerts, 1994). Slow reading is contrasted with speed reading
Speed reading
Speed reading is a collection of reading methods which attempt to increase rates of reading without greatly reducing comprehension or retention. Methods include chunking and eliminating subvocalization...

 which involves techniques to increase the rate of reading without adversely affecting comprehension, and contrasted with skimming  which employs visual page cues to increase reading speed.

Philosophy and literature

The earliest reference to slow reading appears to be in Nietzsche's (1887) preface to Daybreak
The Dawn (book)
The Dawn is a book written by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1881 ....

: "It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading."

Birkerts
Sven Birkerts
Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."Birkerts was born in Pontiac,...

 (1994) stated "Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book." His statement speaks to the idea that slow reading is not merely about slowing down, but about controlling the pace of reading. Slow readers may speed up at times, and then slow down for the more difficult or pleasurable portions of a text.

The importance of personal control over the speed of reading is echoed by Pullman
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL is an English writer from Norwich. He is the best-selling author of several books, most notably his trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ...

 (2004) who argued that slow reading is needed to reinforce democracy in America. Part of its democratic nature is that the manner of reading is not determined by someone else: "we can skim, or we can read it slowly". A similar view was stated by Postman
Neil Postman
Neil Postman was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University...

 (1985) who noted the character of the ordinary citizen of the 19th century, a mind that could listen for hours on end to political orations clearly shaped by a culture favouring text. Postman warns that reading books is important for developing rational thinking and political astuteness.

Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

, declared a worldwide reading crisis resulting from our global push toward productivity. He asserts that young children are learning to read faster, skipping phonetics and diagramming sentences, and concludes that these children will not grow up to read Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

. He foresees the end of graduate English literature programs. "There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines." He advised re-introducing time into reading, "The mighty imperative is to speed everything up, but there might be some advantage in slowing things down. People are trying slow eating. Why not slow reading?" (2007).

Recent technology using the internet and cell phone texting and tweeting
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 may be contributing to the decline of slow reading.

Slow movement

Carl Honoré
Carl Honoré
Carl Honoré is a Canadian journalist who wrote the internationally best-selling book In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed about the Slow Movement....

 wrote the best-selling book about the slow movement
Slow Movement
The Slow Movement advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 1986 that sparked the creation of the Slow Food organization...

, In Praise of Slow. Honoré's interest in the slow movement began one day in an airport when he saw a book called The One-Minute Bedtime Story. At first it struck him as brilliant — the cure to his nightly tug-of-war with his son’s demands for more stories — then the absurdity of his fast lifestyle called him to his senses. The slow movement acknowledges that "speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating" (2004) but our obsession with speed has turned into an addiction. "When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay." Slow reading is recommended as one of several practices to decelerate from the fast pace of modern life. Jennings (2005) also discussed the book.

Slow reading from this perspective is somewhat different from its tradition in philosophy and literature. As a practice for achieving balance, slow reading often involves reading light material at a relaxed pace for pleasure, and not just complex materials read slowly for insight. Also, the slow movement has a strong theme of locality. Most notably, the slow food
Slow Food
Slow Food is an international movement founded by Carlo Petrini in 1986. Promoted as an alternative to fast food, it strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. It was the first established part of...

 movement encourages buying local foods. With slow reading, this idea takes the form of encouraging local authors, micro-publishing of materials of local interest, and community building around local libraries and reading events.

Research

A number of research studies exist on the problematic aspects of involuntary slow reading. For example, Wimmer (1996) found that a slow reading rate in children indicates a lack of fluency and is a predictor of dyslexia
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...

. A few studies demonstrate the positive value of voluntary slow reading, the type of reading defined in this entry. Nell (1988) showed that there is substantial rate variability during natural reading, with most-liked pages being read significantly slower. Sherry Jr. and Schouten (2002) suggested that close reading could have commercial application as a research method for the use of poetry in marketing. Contrary to the claims of advocates of speed-reading, there is evidence that subvocalization
Subvocalization
Subvocalization, or silent speech, is defined as the internal speech made when reading a word, thus allowing the reader to imagine the sound of the word as it is read. This is a natural process when reading and helps to reduce cognitive load, and it helps the mind to access meanings to enable it to...

 has no observable negative effect on the reading process, and may in fact aid comprehension (Carver, 1990).

There is a fair body of literature in the area of bibliotherapy
Bibliotherapy
Bibliotherapy is an expressive therapy that uses an individual's relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. Bibliotherapy is often combined with writing therapy. Bibliotherapy has been shown to be effective in the treatment of depression...

, a practice involving the selection of materials for therapeutic purposes. The process often involves emotional identification with reading material, and thoughtful discussion with a professional; as such it is a type of slow reading.

The Slow Book Movement was officially founded in Lebanon Springs, NY, in November, 2009, by novelist I. Alexander Olchowski. In the midst of becoming a nonprofit entity, this movement aims to actively promote the act of slowing down to read books. In addition to the Founding Director, Mr. Olchowski, The Slow Book Movement's Assistant Director is Amanda Giracca.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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