Reading in the Digital Age: How to Engage with Texts

Bring back slow reading

I’m a teacher by vocation, and a lifelong avid reader by inclination. I also used to write a lot when I was younger, before I started to work full-time. And I studied both linguistics and literature at university. It would be fair to say that language and text are my be all and end all.

It was at university — oh, about 20 years ago — that I discovered there was another way to read beyond simply getting lost in a good book: you could look at what was happening “behind the words,” so to speak.

You could think about why certain words were used in some scenes, how the story was structured, find connections to other books you’ve read, try to work out what the author left unsaid or hinted at, see how the book fits into the era when it was written. In other words, I learned how to read closely.

Obviously, this only deepened my engagement with written and spoken language. I now notice a kind of doubling happening when I read: I analyze the text for the “behind scenes” action, and at the same time, I kind of go with the flow of the sentences, just following the narrative thread. Often, I take notes (or let Kindle take them for me).

Sometimes, if the book is particularly well written, I get so engrossed that I stop analyzing and just read for the pleasure of it. Whichever way I approach it, though, the text has my full and undivided attention. The longer it is, the better — if it’s good, I want to be engaged with it for as long as possible.

Approaching texts with a short attention span

There was another thing I observed in my literature classes at uni: a lot of people read only slim volumes, and anything over 150 pages long was considered too long. When it was time to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, at about 850 pages, many people just didn’t, and they relied on CliffNotes to tell them what the book was about and what happened in crucial scenes.

At the time, I chalked this up to laziness and/or lack of interest in Victorian literature, and I just wondered why the hell they chose to study English lit in the first place. It wasn’t until I started teaching in high school that I realized this has little to do with laziness, and everything to do with a short attention span, coupled with easy access to the Internet.

In the last few years, there’s been a lot of research on how the amount of information bombarding our brains, especially since we switched to smartphones for news, entertainment, and connection to other people, has affected our ability to process and store information. Crucially, it’s had a remarkable effect on how we read.

We no longer engage with texts, taking time to reflect on their meaning and message, instead we skim. We read the first sentence or two, and then go through the rest of the text in a Z or F pattern, picking up key words along the way in order to get to the overall meaning. And reading screens, instead of print, only exacerbates this. Scrolling encourages skimming.

As Maryanne Wolf has shown in her brilliant essay on this topic,

When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty.

Hell, even Medium publications will tell you in their submission guidelines to avoid long sentences and lengthy texts, to break them up in short, possibly 1-sentence paragraphs, otherwise you will lose the reader’s attention. Conform, or perish.

Seriously?

I thought Medium was a place for writers to get their work out to a reading public (who also write) and receive feedback on it. You know, exchange thoughts, comment on each other’s work, get some encouragement and/or structured criticism?

How are we supposed to have any kind of meaningful exchange on any part of this process, or get inspired, or truly engage with a text, if you’re going to be scared away by a long sentence, or a couple of unknown words?

Ever since I became aware of the skim reading issue, I’ve been on a sort of mission to bring the love of slow, deep reading back into people’s lives. And I figured that one of the ways to do it is to write about good books, and what makes them good. If I happen to inspire even one person to read some of them, I will consider the whole endeavor a success.

Tips for engaging with your reading material

So what can you do to start engaging more with what you read? I’ll tell you what helped me:

• Allocate time for reading. Even if it’s only an hour once a week, spend that hour without distractions from your text. Don’t look at your phone, disregard emails, turn off the TV. Treat it as you would a yoga or spinning class: time to switch off and focus on doing something for yourself.
• Use some of your screen time as reading time. If you are commuting to work by public transport, or are waiting for a doctor’s appointment, use that time to read rather than look at your phone. Scrolling through your social media and clicking on news articles does not count as engaged reading.
• Engage with the text, don’t just consume it: what associations do certain words bring to you? What would you do in that situation? Is something only suggested, or hinted at, and if so, why is it not fully explored? Maybe write down a few notes and/or ideas in response. Also, talk to other people about what you’ve read.
• Read about topics that interest you. This may seem obvious, but a lot of people I know rely on “expert” recommendations, best-of lists, and such. While these can have value in putting you onto some good stuff, they are also curated and pre-selected for you, which means that they reflect someone else’s tastes at best, but more often simply follow market trends and what seems to be “hot” at the moment. If you want to nurture and sustain a reading habit, at least a part of your “syllabus” needs to be self-created.
• Try to read at least one thing in print, rather than consuming everything off your screen(s). For instance, I subscribe to the print version of The New Yorker and sit down with it, and a cup of excellent coffee, once a week. (Pre-plague, I used to go to my favorite coffee shop around the corner and just read the magazine there for an hour or two.)
• Which brings me to my last point: try to read different things. Mix in non-fiction (e.g. a good biography; a well-researched long-read article) with the fiction. If you’re interested in engineering, or financial markets, consider subscribing to a good specialist magazine that will feed into this curiosity you have.

Reading is ultimately about investing in your personal growth. If you also want to be a good writer, then any half-decent one will tell you that you need to read more, and read widely, in order to hone your craft. So try some of the suggestions above and let me know if they worked for you.