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.
I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
There are several places in Vietnam where they're teaching computer science from second grade in class, so they don't have a gender divide because everybody is expected to program.
I'm kind of old-school and love nothing more than sitting, opening a book, and reading it. But I also love listening to audio books.
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak.
The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
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