![]() I trace the margin with my finger as I read, like a learner-reader, so I can pause and think about what I have just read and not lose my place. Lately I have been trying – with difficulty, because I am by nature a grazer and skimmer – to read more slowly. But this advocacy often emphasises “avid”, “passionate” or “voracious” reading – none of which adjectives suggest slow, quiet absorption. Reading is constantly promoted as a social good and source of personal fulfilment. But the slow reading movement has yet to take off in the same way. We hear a lot today about recovering the lost virtues of slowness – by, for instance, spending time on locally sourcing and preparing a meal, or leaving children to explore the world unsupervised and at their own pace. There is too much speaking and reacting, and not enough listening and reflecting. Writing and reading online, we struggle to find this silence out of which words can materialise and be contemplated. Poets and lyrically minded prose writers see the written word rather as Quaker worship sees the spoken word: they think it more powerful if it emerges out of and is separated by silence. “A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise,” the poet Billy Collins once said. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, straining to be heard. ![]() But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly harvested as fodder to say something else. This mode of writing and reading can be democratic, interactive and fun. An online article starts forming a comment thread underneath as soon as it is published. A text or tweet is a slightly interrupted, virtual way of having a conversation. Digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. In the analogue era, writing was read much later than it was written. But mostly writing would be farmed out to professionals, and appear only in print. You might see the odd person signing a cheque or pencilling in an appointment in their Filofax. There would be no people sitting in coffee shops urgently stabbing their laptops with two fingers, or updating the social network with the headline news of their lives. If you time travelled just a few decades into the past, you would wonder at how little writing was happening, outside a classroom. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. “No one ever said that sonnets or haikus were evidence of short attention spans.” The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycleĪnd yet the internet has certainly changed the way we read. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention span lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decadence – bonbons for lazy readers,” the American author Charles Baxter wrote back in 1989, in an introduction to an anthology of flash fiction. So far, the anxieties have proved false alarms. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans. Skimming is all part of that virtuoso human act. One of the little miracles of silent reading is that we can do it so quickly and yet also subvocalise, semi-hearing the words in our heads. ![]() From about the age of nine, our eyes start to bounce around the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gaps by inference. Skimming is the skill we acquire as children as we learn to read more sophisticatedly.
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