Empowering Minds: The Advantages of Solitary Reading

Benefits for students reading aloud and alone

Often, reading aloud will turn on the lightbulb. (Bethany Laird/Unsplash)

Many students may remember the joys of someone reading to you when you were young. Snuggling up with Mom or Dad and Dr. Seuss on the sofa was not only a pleasure, but also a loving attempt to create in you an affection for books and the desire to read them by yourself someday.

Of course, the benefits of read-alouds don’t stop with pre-school. In “The Read-Aloud Family,” Sara Mackenzie makes the case that reading together when children grow older—this means you—builds family culture and provides a springboard for discussions between parents and kids. Maybe your family already sets aside time each week for sharing a book. If not, you might consider giving that idea a platform.

And someday you’ll likely find yourself revisiting those magic moments from your younger years, reading aloud to your own children or even to an ailing grandparent or parent. In “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction,” Meghan Cox Gurdon recommends read-alouds in nursing and retirement homes as a means of sharpening mental acuity in the elderly and bringing them the pleasures of a good story. If some relative of yours grows heavy with age and needs livening up, read to them and see what happens.

But what about reading out loud when there is no audience, when it’s just you and the words on a page—a poem or an essay assigned in class, a history textbook, a mathematical concept? Are there occasions when reading aloud to yourself can offer gifts you’ve never considered?

Become Your Own Editor

It’s possible you may already read aloud when you’re by yourself, often without realizing it. Maybe you’re putting some gadget together, or installing some app on your phone, and it just isn’t working. So you go over the directions again, more slowly, and read them aloud, as in “Step 1: Put the circular widget in the square hole.”

Try this same tactic when you write an essay for school. When you think you’ve finished, that’s when you want to read your composition aloud, in a steady unhurried voice, to a friend, family member, or yourself, looking not only for grammatical goofs but listening for lines that sound clunky, repetitive, or lame.

Lots of writers, including me, often do a read-aloud before sending out an article, like a pilot inspecting the plane one last time before take-off. Do this, and you’re behaving like a professional.

Retention

The unnamed author of the online article “Can Reading Out Loud Versus Reading Silently Really Give You an Advantage?” answers that question with a resounding “yes.” Reading aloud increases your ability to retain the facts and general information found in your class notes and textbooks. As the author points out, this tactic works because we are engaged more physically in the text, bringing speech and hearing into learning, “amplifying the connection to the information.”

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Interestingly, “follower reading,” the practice in some classrooms and study groups of one person reading from a book while others follow along in their copies, may actually be detrimental to learning. “Follower reading is much like sitting in a lecture and not taking notes,” writes our anonymous author. Except for strong auditory learners, this learning technique should be avoided.

Comprehension

Twice in my lifetime I’ve tried reading Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel “In Search of Lost Time,” and twice I’ve failed. Some people delight in this masterpiece, while others, like me, find its serpentine sentences, detailed descriptions, and sheer length an exquisite form of torture.

At any rate, a good friend recently started climbing Mount Proust and was so enthusiastic that I decided to give it one more go-around—third time’s the charm and all that. Almost immediately, a sentence nearly two pages long knocked me sideways. After I read it—skimmed is the better word—I realized its meaning had escaped me entirely, and so, taking the advice shared with you here, I read that sentence aloud.

This time I made it mine, and I could see where Proust was headed.

So when you’re studying some passage for school that boggles the mind—an explanation of the mole in chemistry or of the shifting alliances in Europe before the First World War—read it aloud. If that fails, try again. If that second attempt fails, and you’ve aimed sincerely and carefully at comprehension, then it’s time to ask a teacher or some whiz in the class for help.

Most of the time, though, reading aloud will turn on the lightbulb.

Breathing Life into Words

The poetry of Emily Dickinson or Dylan Thomas, the second act of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” assigned for homework, Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”—most verse and plays were made for speech, not for silence. Read them aloud, add a bit of drama to your performance, and you’re giving the words a heartbeat and making them a part of yourself.

Give reading aloud a try this school year. Unless your little sister catches you and tells your friends you’re going crazy talking to yourself, you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.