Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.
Interpretation
Reading allows for deeper comprehension and reflection compared to oral language media.
In this quote, Maryanne Wolf highlights the distinct advantages of reading as a medium for acquiring knowledge. Unlike auditory experiences like films or tapes, reading provides an opportunity to pause and reflect, leading to greater understanding and insight. This unique aspect of reading fosters critical thinking and allows one to engage with the material in a more meaningful way.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of literacy.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).
I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: 'Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.'
Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
Don't be afraid to ask the 'dumb' question, everyone else will be relieved you had the guts to ask!
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