the ready ones are, but they
don’t possess the habits and
strategies needed to carry on.
The Demands
of Complex Texts
Unfortunately, digital texts
and tools don’t help much.
Complex texts pull young
minds in one direction,
digital diversions in another.
Complex texts demand three
dispositions of readers.
A Willingness to Probe
Complex texts can be lengthy
and opaque, the product of
careful thought and studied
composition. To address
them, readers may need to sit
down with them for several
hours of concentration.
Readers need to be patient
enough to ponder a single
sentence for a few minutes,
because many complex texts
aren’t just purveyors of information, but expressions of
value and perspective.
One can’t rush by phrases from
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—such
as, “I went to the woods because I
wished to live deliberately”—and still
follow the meaning of the work. Readers
must stop for a moment, even if only to
shake their heads and mumble, “Huh?”
They insert a hesitant question before
moving on. What does he mean, “
deliberately”? Maybe Thoreau thinks you
have to ponder each experience before
you file it into your memory. The full
import of deliberation emerges only as
the chapters unfold.
Such works as Walden are opaque
precisely because they pose Why? ques-
tions without always providing answers,
making readers turn them over, peek
around and under them, and draw
a tentative inference or two. Often
readers can’t find a ready fact, moral,
and means of reading are
not a matter of choice. They
are deep and semiconscious
behaviors that are difficult
to change except through
the diligent exercise of other
reading behaviors. Consider
the metaphor—you don’t
change a habit, you break
a habit. For teenagers who
send up to 3,000 text mes-
sages per month on their cell
phones and who spend their
entire school day surrounded
by the tools of acceleration,
decelerating their reading
when complex texts come
up in class becomes nearly
impossible.
or definition to resolve these questions; and they are stuck with their own
meandering suppositions.
That willingness to pause and probe
is essential, but the dispositions of
digital reading run otherwise. Fast
skimming is the way of the screen.
Blogs, chats, and comments are usually
hastily produced and consumed. The
more students become habituated to
them, they more they will eschew a slow
and deliberate pace; or, rather, the more
they will read quickly and fail to comprehend. If they have grooved for many
years a reading habit that races through
texts, as is the case with texting, e-mail,
Twitter, and other exchanges, 18-year-
olds will have difficulty suddenly
downshifting when faced with a long
modernist poem.
Even when they realize that they need
to slow down, the fast-skimming habit
presses forward, for an individual’s ways
The Capacity for
Uninterrupted Thinking
Complex text reading
requires few interruptions.
The train of thought and
action doesn’t wait while
readers check e-mail or
answer a text message. Take
Nietzsche’s book unfolds in spurts
of declamation, alternately vatic and
ironic, and it trades in knotty, trou-
bling terms such as “the Will to Truth.”
Nietzsche tosses provocations, such as
the famous opening, “Supposing truth
is woman—what then?” with abandon;
and these sallies make sense only in the
larger context of later sallies on prej-
udice, philosophy, inquiry, and virtue.
Are the males in the class to think,
“Truth is something to romance?” Are
the females to think, “We are truth?” As
they continue reading, a more mature
30 Educational lEadErship / FEbruary 2011
