IMPACT OF READING

“We read to learn. We read to live another way. We read to quench some blind and shocking fire. We read to weigh the worth of what we have done or dare to do. We read to share our awful secrets with someone we know will not refuse us. We read our way into the presence of great wisdom, vast and safe suffering, or into the untidy corners of another kind of life we fear to lead” – remarked Frank Jennings.

Reading is a creature of society. People invented writing when they first felt the need to communicate ideas in a more permanent form than in speech. Thereupon, they simultaneously created the need for interpreting written symbols through a process which came to be called reading.

Other modes of communication have come and gone through the ages, but reading as a process of interpreting graphic symbols has endured because of its convenience and practicability.

Why do the world’s leaders attach so much importance to the training of reading? Because they know that “Leading Nations are the reading nations.”

Thomas Jeffersen wrote in one of his letters, “ people who read can be free because reading banishes ignorance and superstition.” “Who leads mankind,” asked Voltaire. “Those who know how to read and write.” The printed word has the power to revolutionize our ways of thinking and living.

Reading as an aid to Learning

As an aid to learning, reading possesses unique characteristics. Of special significance is the fact that it utilizes printed or written words as symbols of meaning.

Purposes for which People Read

People read for different purposes at different moments. Hathaway (6) identified 1620 purposes of reading, which were classified under nine major headings; namely:

1.      To gain meanings 
2.      To gain information 
3.      To guide activity
4.      For social motives (that is, to influence or entertain others) 
5.      To find values 
6.      To organize
7.      To solve problems 
8.      To remember 
9.      To enjoy

Books Have Soothing Effect

Reading makes the young readers learn to understand reasons for making moral and ethical choices. Lloyd Alexander has said:

We have machines to think for us; we have no machines to suffer for us, or to rejoice for us. Technology has not made us magicians, only sorcerer’s apprentices. We can push a button and light a dozen cities. We can also push a button and make a dozen cities vanish.there is, unfortunately no button we can push to relieve us of moral choice or give us the wisdom to understand morality as well as the choices.  

Identification with others

In real life people are too opaque, too difficult to know and understand. They live behind their masks and mislead themselves and others as to their real natures. In print, the caracters can be more real, more intense and revealed, for “we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are heppening. “we identify ourselves with the hero ; hearing, seeing and feeling with him in all his action.

The conscious enjoyment and suffering that the reader feels through identification are even more strongly experienced in the unconscious, according to psychoanalytic theories of literature. As the reader projects his impulses and introjects those of the model, he achieves catharsis, which opens the way for development of new insights, feelings , and behaviours.

Source: “How to Read Effectively & Efficiently” by G.C. Ahuja & Pramila Ahuja
image source : www.republika.co.id