through the French landscape at more
than 200 miles per hour—that is, until I
learned that at these high speeds, even
the distant scenery becomes a blur. The
retina simply can’t take in a clear picture
at that rate of movement.
The same thing can happen in
reading. I’d like to explore what we miss
when we define good reading as fast
reading and to argue for what Ellin
Keene has called “dwelling” in the texts
we read.
Silencing Reading
First, some background on how we got
here. The greatest debate on reading
instruction occurred early in the 20th
century. The “reader” of McGuffey’s
famous textbooks was an oral reader.
Comprehension was part of the picture,
but to be an ideal reader, the student
had to be able to perform orally. If a
teacher addressed the reading rate at all,
it was to caution the student about
reading too fast. But this approach
There is real pleasure in slowing down.
We can gain some pleasures and
meanings no other way.
Author and media theorist Neil
Postman provides a foundation for this
argument in his classic book, Teaching as
a Conserving Activity (1979). Schools,
Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle; a thermostat acts to
cool when a room is too hot and heat
when a room is too cool. According to
Postman, schools should act to check—
and not to imitate—some tendencies in
the wider information environment.
“The major role of education in the
years immediately ahead,” he writes, “is
to help conserve that which is necessary
to a humane survival and threatened by
a furious and exhausting culture”
(p. 25).
Schools need to take a stand for an
alternative to an increasingly hectic
digital environment where so many of
us read and write in severely abbreviated messages and through clicks of the
mouse. Postman frames this imperative
as a moral one. But, like the slow food
movement, we can make a case on the
basis of pleasure. The term taste applies
to both literacy and eating. And to taste,
we have to slow down.
became increasingly viewed as antiquated, inefficient, and mismatched to
the ways people read outside school.
In a classic study of the psychology of
reading, Edmund Huey (1921) claimed
that oral reading had a ceiling of about
four words per second, whereas silent
readers could process texts at two or
three times that rate—with no diminish-ment of comprehension. It was time, he
argued, for reading to go silent. Lip
readers and subvocalizers (like me) were
viewed as too stubbornly tied to the
sound of words, too limited by the
inefficient mechanisms of breath and
speech. Huey did claim that silent
readers retained a form of inner speech
with traces of sound awareness, but at
the higher and more efficient speed of
reading, readers only sampled sounds—
the train was moving too fast.
So reading went silent.
This is the world of reading that we
have inherited—one suited to the faster
pace of 21st-century life, one better
matched to the new abundance of
books and magazines. (Who wants to
rush through reading if only a few
books are available?) Yet our attraction
to sounds, to the rhythms of speech,
and to a human voice in the text is
primal. We attend readings, listen to
books on tape, or feel the presence of a
narrator in fiction—all of which return
us to the “inefficient” rate of regular
speech. Authors like Richard Ford
painstakingly read their nearly finished
novels aloud; writers continually attest
to the importance of finding the right
“voice” for their work. Some of us begin
our classes by reading a poem aloud,
and we ask our students to read their
work aloud in workshops. In church,
we may listen to and meditate on a
single verse from the Bible, one we have
heard many times before. And we are
alienated by authorless, bureaucratic
