My love of reading has only been dimmed by one device, one whose deviousness defies its simplicity: the pen. Not content to use the pen as a writing instrument, some teachers foisted it upon me as a reading instrument as well. Every margin had to be filled with comments, every important scene and character development had to be noted, every sentence had to be dutifully checked for its highlighter worthiness.
And if you, dear reader, experienced this as well and relished it, if you are clenching your weapon of choice even now as you read, if you delight in my verbosity and scorn my use of archaic punctuation: PUT THE PEN DOWN AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY.
Thank you.
I will admit I am quite biased here. I am a writer and a storyteller too, and to me the skimming of a book with a pen-tip is nothing more or less than the desecration of that book. It is often called “active reading,” and I have seen it in a variety of forms in my classes, from the innocuous required underlining to the blatant blackening of the margins with notes. This practice speaks of something very wrong with the modern direction of teaching literature. We have forgotten why we read books.
Here is a challenge: Try going the rest of the day without telling a story. Realize, every joke you tell, every memory you share is a story. Without these things, we are socially gagged. We cannot talk about how hard our day was or how great that touchdown was or anything else that happened in the past. We become automatons of simple orders and simple descriptions.
Stories are critical to communication; they are essential to our being. The same is true for books. They satisfy our thirst for the bigger, richer, more complex tales.
That is why we read literature, but why do we teach it?
I hear the question a lot, only from a different perspective – I am a math major, and people quite often ask why we teach math. There are many answers, and this is mine: Math is not taught so that you will learn multiplication tables, but so that if you are faced with a mathematical problem later in life, you will have the tools available to solve it. Similarly, literature is not taught so that you will learn specific stories, but to help you better express yourself and understand someone else.
And to this purpose, “active reading” is only counter-productive.
In practical terms, it breaks one of the cardinal rules of writing itself: Never let the reader know they are reading. Because the moment that a reader remembers that they are reading, their connection with the world of the book is – if only for a moment – shattered.
When I read, I immerse myself so fully in the book’s universe that I forget I am turning pages and reading lines. Every time I was ordered to highlight or write in the margins, I had to tear myself away from the punching dialogue and gripping description to note that there was punching dialogue and gripping description on that page, and all at once their charm vanished. I have some books so stuffed with scribbles that I have forgotten every word, character and event in the story.
And the return for all this pain is minimal. Yes, it can help make finding an important quote easier, but so would a sticky tab, while being much less obtrusive. Yes, it can help in analysis, but the analysis would be superficial (there is a good reason why scholars can write an entire book analyzing another book). Yes, it can help develop a relationship with the text, but why should that ever be forced?
In the end, all active reading does is turn a good book into report fodder. Books should be books, not exercises for crafting thesis statements. And papers should be chances to explore the literature, not mere tests to see if students actually read. If the only purpose behind reading a book is for that report, then the entire purpose of the book was missed.
I am not writing this article so some student a hundred years from now can dig it up as a reference on the artistic philosophy of the early 21st century. You are probably not reading it for this reason either (at least, I hope you aren’t). I am writing to share my opinion.
I do not tell a story just to give you a message. I tell a story to share a piece of imagination.