I definitely believe that less and less people are reading. I have many, many friends who always question my love for literature and English. They ask why I would ever pick to major in something where I read constantly. And I always respond with the same thing: How can you not enjoy reading? Now I'm not going to sit here and say I loooove reading all the time. There are days when I'm exhausted and there is no way that I'm going to be able to sit down and actually comprehend the words before me. However, the days where I enjoy reading outnumber these bad days and so I find myself a bookworm even after all these years. So when I read Professor Power's essay, Reading Ethnic Literature Now, I was shocked at the arguments and statistics he gave about college students leaving college and still unable to read and comprehend labels for some sort of experiment with blood pressure and physical activity. This shocked me. Now maybe I'm just naive and unaware, but seriously? Is it that bad?
In some ways I wasn't completely surprised. Many of my friends seem to be almost elementary in the way they read and write. I know that sounds horrible but I'm honestly not trying to be mean or act high and mighty. I've corrected some of my friends papers (and I know this isn't the same as reading but I feel like these two go hand-in-hand) and I've been blown away at how undeveloped they appear. It's as if either students absolutely LOVED English throughout their school years and so they really excelled at it and worked on it or they absolutely HATED English and so they didn't even try.
I know the majority of Professor Powers' essay is concerning multi-ethnic literature and how it is important to incorporate this in our reading but I was just really struck with the information regarding people's lack of interest in reading books. Am I alone here?
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3 comments:
yikes! no you are not alone here, amanda. i also have these thoughts about the declining number of college students whose comprehension skills are at a proficient level (and scary--that's just the college students, not even the rest of the population which is quite a large amount). i've also edited a few friends' papers and have several times thought the same thing you have written here--that they either loved English in grade school and kept improving within that subject or hated it and totally neglected any comprehension or composing skill development.
at the same time, i understand the decline in reading unassigned literature. during the school year, i have to read so much that when i do have free time, i want to spend it doing activities that are less imagination-based and more reality-driven. does that make sense? essentially, if i have free time, i want to spend it interacting with tangible people rather than characters in a book. i wonder if the decline in reading is a consequence of our society packing too much work into our schedules...but perhaps that is a different subject that can be addressed on someone else's soapbox.
Amanda,
YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Ever since I changed my major to English I have a difficult time even picking up an easy read during summer break. I feel guilty if I don't circle, underline, and analyze things. How bad is that? Reading has become a chore, which is really sad.
I agree with you, Amanda and everyone who commented. The report that the NEA put out about reading said that, of the adult age brackets, the one that read the fewest books was the 18-24 years old age bracket. But personally I think that may be because that's the college bracket, and the NEA didn't include assignments as reading ... so obviously if we only have time to read assignments it won't look like we're reading anything else.
But as far as the thing about reading the blood pressure chart goes ... I wasn't really so sure what that proved. Reading a chart and reading a novel are two very different things. I can read pretty well, but I get tripped up by charts and graphs all the time. But I've read a lot of people's papers outside of the English major, and I guess there definitely could be a problem with reading comprehension. I just don't know if it's actually a PROBLEM that literacy is declining, or if those people are just seriously missing out on what I think is one of the most enjoyable activities of all. I don't know ... it's a tough issue.
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