Even light reading provides a host of benefits, increasing verbal and creative skills, nourishing our capacity for empathy, and even reducing prejudice against stigmatized groups—all skills that are developed as readers become accustomed to inhabiting unfamiliar worlds, seeing things from new perspectives, and contemplating how a chain of events can lead to unforeseen outcomes. And that dichotomy is completely misguided. Introduce students to Romeo and Juliet , but give them the option to read The Fault in Our Stars as well; let them read comic books and manga, sports writing and plays, sci-fi and horror novels.
In the classroom, said Martin-Chang, model a love of reading—go beyond grammar and meaning and inhabit the narrative worlds on the page. However, the advantages derived from regular reading could be considered equally beneficial for students in any field.
Read on for an overview of the ways that reading recreationally can positively affect your writing skills and academic performance. People who read regularly are less likely to make grammar mistakes in their own writing. In many ways, this relationship is simply logical; it makes sense that exposure to properly-structured sentences and paragraphs will make it easier to follow these same rules when you sit down to write.
Earlier this year, I spoke to many students who were struggling to properly format sections of dialogue in their narrative essays. If you rarely read novels, the rules that govern the positioning of quotation marks, commas, and periods in transcribed speech can definitely be difficult to follow. Formatting dialogue is just one example, though--the grammar skills you pick up through reading recreationally are just as beneficial to students writing lab reports or annotated bibliographies.
Reading can dramatically expand your vocabulary. Studies have shown a clear link between the frequency with which people read and the size of their vocabularies Wiesen. Reading exposes you to a range of new words and often provides the necessary context for you to determine their meanings without needing to look up definitions, so you may find your vocabulary expanding without even realizing that this process is occurring.
As you can imagine, a large vocabulary makes it much easier to express complex ideas in a clear, accessible way. Relatedly, reading a diversity of writers can expose you to different writing styles and allow you to assess which ones appeal to you most and which seem most effective for certain forms of communication; for instance, you may find that a direct, blunt writing style serves well for a persuasive essay, while a style with more complex sentences is effective for a descriptive paper.
Regardless of what field you study, a broad vocabulary and a sense of how best to use it will be hugely advantageous when completing assignments.
Reading books unrelated to your post-secondary studies can diversify your knowledge base and develop your interest in new subjects. One of the characters in this book is a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots WASPs of World War II, and I found myself completely drawn in by the historical details about these female pilots who endured discrimination and disenfranchisement while training pilots and ferrying planes. This reaction is representative of the ways in which reading novels can expand your horizons, exposing you to concepts and life experiences of which you might never have become aware.
Without a list of topics to choose from, it can be difficult to find a subject that both interests the student and seems relevant to the assignment. Reading full-length books improves your ability to focus for extended periods of time.
Often, the factors preventing students from reading assigned texts are practical in nature; for instance, it may be necessary to prioritize the completion of a major assignment over the reading of an article that will be briefly discussed in class.
However, it is also common for students to have the time for readings but lack the attention span to complete them. The human attention span is fairly short, and research indicates that it has been shrinking in recent years Watson. Changing schools, jobs or cities may require you to replace old relationships with new ones, and sometimes successful adjustments are harder or take longer than expected.
For all of the reasons in this article and more, reading makes us feel optimistically, breathlessly, tenaciously alive. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email.
Benefits of reading Reading dares you to grow. Katie Yakovleva, author of this article. Reading allows you to experience multiple realities. Reading challenges your perspective. Reading helps you remember. Reading helps you forget. Reading brings life. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research.
Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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