“Decades ago, studies conducted by reading researchers demonstrated the importance of knowledge to comprehension, as Hugh Catts (2021–2022) has noted. Knowledge, they found, helps readers supply information that authors inevitably leave out—in other words, it helps readers make inferences; take in, analyze, and retain new information; and make predictions. Having knowledge about a topic also […]
“Sometime in my late 20s I realised – I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect – that what I wanted was the maximal complexity of thinking in the clearest language that would support that thinking. Being avant garde isn’t about being unreadable.”
“Distant grass will always have a greener hue. You can fine-tune the appearance of distant grass in Settings > Graphics.”
“Over the last 50 years, there’s been a vast outpouring of research about reading development, drawing on insights from neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, educators and other experts. I’m sometimes asked to summarize, in plain language, what we’ve learned so far. These ten maxims represent my best attempt at doing that.”
“The generative text evokes a feeling in me not unlike the revulsion of hearing one’s own speaking voice in a recording. Do I really sound like that? The robot has made me acutely self-conscious. I recognize my A.I. doppelgänger, and I don’t like it.”
“Readers evaluate the intelligence of an author not only by the quality of their arguments but also by how well they understand what the author is trying to say. Using simple words and sentences makes the point clear. Big words don’t make writing sound intelligent; they make it hard to understand.”
“But first, step back and consider the anatomy of a typical business book. The components are almost always the same: Concepts (key ideas); Numbers (data and statistics); Tools (frameworks and diagnostics); Examples (stories and case studies to illustrate application). The job to be done is to extract insights to increase judgment and skills to increase […]
“All in all, the researchers suggest that the data represent an even outcome, with both learning modalities proving successful at increasing student growth and achievement in writing.”
“For example, the editors of Science have decided that authors should not use text generated by ChatGPT in a submitted manuscript. Fair enough. But can authors use ChatGPT to generate an early outline for a manuscript? …What feels most different about ChatGPT compared to other assistive technologies is the possible reduction of intellectual labor. For most professors, writing — even […]
“Colorado’s law – passed in 2019 – is pretty extensive. It requires school districts to completely overhaul their reading curriculum. As of this school year, all districts must use an “evidence and scientifically based” reading program, teachers all have to go through 45 hours of training on it, and they even banned curriculum rooted in […]
“The results showed that the relation between domain knowledge and reading is bidirectional and positive throughout the elementary years, providing empirical evidence that domain knowledge and reading may mutually enhance with each other.”
“Some writers write in the name of Art in general—James Salter for instance: “A great book may be an accident, but a good one is a possibility, and it is thinking of that that one writes. In short, to achieve.” Eudora Welty said she wrote “for it, for the pleasure of it.” Or as Joy Williams puts […]
“Nearly a century old, it’s still avidly read and discussed in MFA circles, thanks to its author’s meticulous dissection of the devices of fiction, likely more valuable than any of the most recent craft books on the shelves. Unquestionably, it has been a kind of ur-text for many fledgling novelists because it discloses so clearly […]
“If you’re new here, here’s how it works: 1. I read all of the Most Anticipated and Best Summer Reading lists that flood the internet this time of year (or at least as many as I can find). 2. I count how many times each book is included. 3. I collate them for you in […]
“The New Yorker sort of voice—or rather, the New Yorker voice I was using—is one that sounds on top, or ahead, of the material under discussion. It is a voice of intelligent curiosity; it implies that the writer has synthesized a great deal of information; it confidently takes readers by the hand, introduces them to surprising characters, recounts dramatic scenes, and […]
“True rhymes are marvels; a slant rhyme’s a sin. Or is it vice versa? Let the battle begin.”
“He saw the damage done by a teaching model that focussed on error and that proposed simplistic, mechanical “fixes” to student writing. This was an ostensibly scientific approach to writing composition that equated students with their “deficits”—and implicitly encouraged students to identify with them… Mike, on the other hand, provided writing studies with a heart: […]
“When I pressed the button asking Sudowrite to continue “Kubla Khan” in an “ominous” style, it generated the following… I find this beautiful, memorable. If you told me that Coleridge wrote it, I would believe you. The machine even put in the indents.”
“Aspiring writers should, by all means, read books, but those that grow up deprived of literature, in the absence of books due to wars, exile, and poverty, should not lose heart. They can find other ways to garner ideas and build their storytelling techniques. They could learn to read—with the same curiosity and intensity given […]
“I once asked what made her pick my manuscript all those years ago. “I didn’t like your book,” she said, without hesitation. I started laughing—her famous candor often had this effect on me, even if it was at my expense. “Why did you pick it, then?” I replied, incredulous. Her eyes widened: “Because I couldn’t […]
“Reading for teaching is a little like eating a meal and trying, afterward, to write up a recipe for each dish.”
“Right now, a machine is breathing for my father, buying time in a ward I can neither visit nor see. The doctors talk a lot about time: How fast or slow he breathes — COVID comes for your breath — and how quick or sluggish his blood pressure, the beat of his heart. There is […]
“It won’t be long before all living memory of a time before the personal computer is gone. People will no longer address the meaning of screens from the remembered background of a computer-free life.”
“Let us collectively weep for the dying art of letter writing. Then, let’s dry our tears and bring it back to life. Below, you’ll find snippets from historical love letters — some of which are centuries old — pulled from “Love Letters” and “A Love No Less.” You’ll also see tips for crafting your own […]
“After subscribing to a service called EssaySoft, you can tell its essay generator to write a paper on, say, “symbolism in the great Gatsby” (or whatever you need for class). Then you enter how many words you want the final paper to be, select other specs from drop-down menus (set research depth to “low” if […]
“I believe the formula I’ve given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should warn you that it’s also a recipe for making people mad.”
“My students have come of age during a decade when public discourse means taking a position and sticking with it. The most influential writers are those who create a dazzling moral clarity. Its light is meant to overpower subjects, not illuminate them… The imperative to take a position can be stunting. It makes writers less […]
“In a study we conducted with Yale University, we found that students are able to maintain writing tasks for longer and their writing and speaking fluency dramatically improve when they learn how to tell stories from their own lived experience.”
“Keeping the argument on track, and keeping it both civil and productive, is a key skill in critical thinking. It is helped by: making sure everyone is clear about what the point at issue actually is; bringing the conversation back to the point when it strays, or at least acknowledging that we are now talking […]
“The simple view is an equation that looks like this: decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension. Notice that reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension; it’s not the sum. In other words, if you have good language comprehension skills but zero decoding skills, your reading comprehension will be zero, because zero […]
“In effect, narrative feedback is a personalized message giving individualized feedback for the student regarding his or her writing. That is a human interaction, not a bureaucratized one, as with a rubric.”
“Motivation seems to be the key… If students love to write, because their peers as well as their teachers are eager to see what they have to say, then they will write with energy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other subject, writing demands a supportive environment, in which students want to become better writers […]
“That’s why we’ve put together this overview of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It covers what’s known about how we should teach letter-sound patterns, and what we don’t know for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. And it explains why we know that most […]
“Last year, the New York Public Library released an experiment to put the full text of novels in its Instagram Stories. Today, an estimated 300,000 people are reading books this way.”
“In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn’t doom audio any more than radio ended reading.”
“Whether they crack open a book three times a month or every night without fail, all respondents said doing so promotes relaxation, reduces stress, induces sleep, centers the mind, and improves sleep quality.”
“Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.”
“Most kids agree their favorite books are the ones that they have picked out themselves. While we should be talking with students about books, we also have to let them advise how we can better help them find books on their passions and interests.”
“You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.”
“This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.”
“In fact, teens who only made it through high school but were raised in a bookish environment fared as well in adulthood as college grads who grew up in a house bereft of books.”
“The progression from a (nearly) innate theory of mind to a fixation on stories — narrative — was made in only a few short steps. We went from explaining how and why we did things in the present, to explaining how and why we did things in the past, to explaining how and why others did things in the […]
“The new feature is a bit like Google’s Smart Compose, which suggests email responses or phrases as you type. But instead of a few words, Textio Flow thinks up whole paragraphs.”
“Dispensing one, three and five-minute stories free to passersby at the touch of a button, the vending machines… already feature in locations across France, in Hong Kong and the US.”
“The quality varies, but there is plenty of comically or offensively banal work to be found on Instagram: genuinely insightful or distinctive work is the exception, not the rule. The same tropes and themes appear again and again: lower-case platitudes in typewriter fonts; earnest insistence of the importance of self-love; writing in the second person; […]
“Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”
Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team or by yourself — though, please, only one submission per student. When you’re done, submit it using the contest form below by Tuesday, April 2, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules — also below — before posting. Our judges […]
“Then e-mail arrived and changed everything. First, you would only hook the computer up through your landline phone a couple of times a day, as if there were a special moment to send and receive mail. Then came the permanent connection. Finally, the wireless, and, of course, the Internet. In the space of perhaps ten […]
“A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fueling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.”
“Literary fiction, which tends to focus on the psychology of individuals, provides a window into the inner lives of strangers in other times and places. It’s this preoccupation with sensation and thought that makes the form a powerful tool for developing empathy. Stories that transport us also transform us, according to the study. Reading literary […]
We made under-26s and women aged 28 to 45 the focus of our innovation process. Over a year, we interviewed 85 people face-to-face. As well as giving their feedback on our prototypes, they told us about their news behaviours: where they find value, as well as their pain points. Based on these conversations, we developed […]
“The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.”
“There are the obvious benefits, like a boost in mindfulness, memory and communication skills. But studies have also found that writing in a journal can lead to better sleep, a stronger immune system, more self-confidence and a higher I.Q.
“The paper’s authors studied 160,000 adults between 2011 and 2015 and found that just having 80 or more books in a home results in adults with significantly higher levels of literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology (ICT) skills… Children from such homes who ended up attaining just a high-school-level education become as literate, numerate and […]
Since antiquity, teachers had held that scientific subjects were best learned through pictures and working models. Beginners needed to see, touch, and manipulate the objects of study. Teachers of astronomy and mathematics, for example, had long employed three-dimensional models and instruments in their classrooms.”
“Best-selling authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cory Doctorow, comedian Stephen Colbert and… George R. R. Martin all played Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not surprising that burgeoning writers would be drawn to a storytelling game.”
“There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched. Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information. For example, a basic knot tied in […]
There are thousands of studies, said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. This is the most studied aspect of human learning.”
“John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s […]
Parents looking to encourage reading look out for environments that are “impoverished”—that, places where kids might be a bit bored—and fill those spaces up with books.”
“The libraries, which were found in fashionable watering holes like Jane Austen’s fabled Bath, began as offshoots of bookselling. They became social gathering places that people subscribed to as soon as they got to their vacation destination.”
“You want credentials, I ain’t got em. If you want an MFA program or an editor or a publishing house, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But: I write. And, if I may be so bold, I do it halfway okay.”
When students understand that most writing in class is ungraded and meant to promote experimentation, thinking, and discussion, their volume of low-risk writing increases. The more they write, the more confident they become as writers.”
The reason writing a ‘good’ four page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what.”
Somewhere along the way, these young people were told by teachers that who they are in their writing ought to be divorced from who they are on their phones, or as the writer Grace Paley may have said, with their families and on their streets… But no matter who they are in private, when I […]
The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two.”
“I sat in the dark staring at my laptop. I was well into my second hour of watching sword fights on YouTube. I switched between samurai movies, anime, medieval battle scenes, and pirate duels. Two of my students just kept writing about sword fights, and I was trying to be a better teacher. If I […]
A word problem, like an essay, is an argument. You start with the given information. You summarize it with symbols and expressions. You make a plan and follow some logical steps until you arrive at a conclusion. Along the way you’ll likely make mistakes. You might find you spent a disappointing amount of time on […]
See the top books read by 9.4 million K–12 kids based on data from Renaissance Accelerated Reader.”
The difficulty is the point… We all want the same things now: phones, clothes, and food to photograph. We are all consumers. Teenagers don’t want to stick it to the man anymore. They are the man… I want them to find something difficult and do it anyway. Then, I want them to notice what a […]
It is our mission as English teachers to teach writing as a method of thinking, to re-mediate their writing for current and future circumstances and technologies, and to help our students find a sense of agency and empowerment in the act of writing.”
For centuries, Europeans who could read did so aloud. The ancient Greeks read their texts aloud. So did the monks of Europe’s dark ages. But by the 17th century, reading society in Europe had changed drastically. Text technologies, like moveable type, and the rise of vernacular writing helped usher in the practice we cherish today: […]
This pattern raises the possibility that the invention of writing, a very recent innovation tagged on to the very last millennia of human evolution, can dramatically alter a language’s linguistic niche, spurring the development of elaborate sentence structure, and leading to the shedding of other features, on a timescale that cannot be achieved through biological […]
You shouldn’t feel safe. You should feel, “I don’t know if I can write this.” That’s what I mean by dangerous, and I think that’s a good thing to do. Sacrifice something safe.”
The underlying message of all this criticism is that Ms. Kaur’s work isn’t “real literature.” The literary world doesn’t have a great track record of embracing or even acknowledging artists like Ms. Kaur, who are different in some notable way, but who attract an enormous and fervent audience.”
The things [novelists] mean to describe and express when they write, the territory they wish to cover, may be very different from those elements that readers and students focus on. The author of a novel is not always the best placed to interpret it, and eventually others may become more familiar with the text than […]
It has long been thought, for instance, that the print revolution of the 18th century resulted in a shift from oral to silent reading, from shared reading to indulging in a book of one’s own, as books became more available to a wider range of people while leisure time also increased… On the contrary, reading […]
This brings us back to the personal essay. More than a fad and more than a form, we might think of the personal essay as a contract between reader and writer… This task is impossible, or at least impossible to derive pleasure from, without particularity and concreteness—a sense of reciprocity and respect… What we see […]
It was not that he disliked it. It was that he… hated it. I was taken aback—I had enjoyed the process of researching and writing the book. So, I had expected, a reader would too. No, Scott said, the way you’ve done this doesn’t work.”
Writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish.”
Here’s a tip: Choose a topic you really want to write about. If the subject doesn’t matter to you, it won’t matter to the reader. “
The tyranny of the urgent crowds in around me. If I yield to that tyranny, my life fills with mental clutter. Boredom, say the researchers, is when creativity happens. A wandering mind wanders into new, unexpected places. When I retire to the mountains and unplug for a few days, something magical takes place. I’ll go […]
By the end of the war it was clear that information warfare was a powerful weapon — it could raise armies, incite violent mobs, and destabilize whole nations. In response to this systematic manipulation of the truth, there was a concerted effort to create an institution of fact-driven journalism beginning in the 1920’s.
As a teacher, I’ve found that regardless of how open or resistant my literature students initially are to poetry, real progress begins when they get literal with the words on the page. I ask them to pick one interesting word, then go to the library and investigate that word.”
Ohio State, the football-mad university of more than 60,000 students, could hardly be more different from Williams College, the prestigious liberal arts school in the Berkshires… But this summer, all of their incoming students received the same reading assignment”
Precisely defined terms are often superior to poetic images for the purposes of science, but the opposite is true in our own personal experience of the world — the poetic image, while more vague, is also more meaningful and a better fit for understanding our own inner lives as well as the messy affairs of […]
There are no rubrics, no rules, no strategies. There is audience and need, and the problem must be solved.”
Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters’ inner experiences may sharpen readers’ general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that’s the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the […]
I’m baffled by the idea that reaching a wider audience involves using smaller words, as if there’s some inverse correlation between the size of your audience and of your vocabulary.”
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital […]
Dear Match Book: I Need Short but Great Books for My Commute… Dear Match Book: What Books Are Best Savored by Reading Aloud?… Books for Those Who Love Sports or Just Love to Read About Them…”
Shortly after waking, they curl up with a journal and pen or pencil. They start writing, and they don’t stop until they’ve filled at least three hand-written pages—about 750 words. The routine is called Morning Pages, and people ranging from journalist Oliver Burkeman to entrepreneur Tim Ferriss say it’s changed their lives.”
Utterly contrived topic sentence revealing pretty much every flaw of structured essay writing. Therefore, supporting sentence invoking source that exists only in the bibliographies of other cited material (pp. arbitrary to arbitrary + 5). Contemplative question? Definitive refutation paraphrased from a blog found at 2AM.”