Reading aloud

There's an interesting discussion happening now on Arthurnet, the mailing list for all things King Arthur about the effects of reading out loud.

Mark Adderly, Professor of English at Missouri Valley College suggests that "your emotional response is keener to something to which you listen." I think he's quite right on this.

To prove his claim, he asks, "has anyone tried reading Tomie da Paola's books aloud to children? I defy anyone to get through the last three pages of The Clown of God completely unaffected" [the book is marvelous and I recommend it highly]. It truly is difficult to read those final lines and not be moved.

Why is it that reading aloud has this effect on us, a different effect than reading silently? Professor Adderly offers the following possibility:

I think the reason for it, though I don't have any knowledge of neuroscience to back me up, is that you respond more readily to a storyteller because the storytelling is physical, and emotions are physical. If you just read something visually, then your response is merely intellectual. I don't mean to say that these two types of response are mutually exclusive, just that there's a tendency to respond emotionally to something read aloud, and intellectually to something read silently.

I think he's right, in much the same way that reading something aloud also helps us remember it. Not only do we use two senses, but the emotions as well.

If what he suggests is true, then why do we so rarely read aloud? Or have someone read to us (childhood years excepted)? I do know the answer to this.

I will occassionaly read aloud, not for a greater emotional response but to retain what I read and to help focus if I'm distracted. I suspect I'll have to try it for the emotional response now and again.

Up until Saint Ambrose of Milan, and the great Doctor of the Church and the one who baptized Saint Augustine, no one read silently but everyone read aloud.

When Augustine arrived in Milan, Ambrose, the Bishop of the city, was in his late forties. He and Augustine became close friends, Ambrose being his mentor.

When Augustine first met Ambrose in his study. Augustine says this of that first encounter:

When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.

This way of reading quite baffled Augustine and his contemporaries and did not become commonplace in the West until some five centuries later.

That's your tidbit for the day. You'll find an intersting history of reading here.