Life & Style | Education
Reasons to read
Lecturer in literature at UAE University Robert Leslie Fielding says that every time you open a book you learn something.
- By Robert Leslie Fielding
- Published: 00:00 November 12, 2005
- Grammar (word order)
- Vocabulary (word choice)
- Punctuation (word spacing)
- Capitalisation (word mechanics)
- Sentence length (the number and types of words used)
- The different parts of speech (how words are formed — what they mean — where they fit in the sentence)
- Chunks of language (phrases and groups of words)
- Collocations (which words usually accompany other words)
- And content (traditionally in first place for most readers)
- Register (A particular variety of language used in a particular setting.)
Lecturer in literature at UAE University Robert Leslie Fielding says that every time you open a book you learn something.
According to the Swiss philosopher and poet Henri-Frederic Amiel: "It is in writing that we come to think." And it is surely in reading that we learn what other people think. Digesting what we read helps us to review our opinions of the world and everything in it — this is what learning is.
We learn when we read something. We learn about the world in which we live. We may never visit the Amazon basin, the Sahara Desert or the moon — we may never fly a plane, run a four-minute mile or paint a masterpiece — but we can read about these things, learn something about them and come nearer to understanding them — we can learn what it is like to live in one of those places or do one of those things, and although it is not the same thing as actually doing them or visiting them, it is the nearest most of us will ever get.
Reading can teach us other things too. Reading what someone else has written tells us something about them, and noticing the language they use to convey their ideas can tell us something about language and how it can be used.
For example, we can notice how punctuation is used properly. You know how to use the question mark and the full stop, but what about using brackets, the colon, semi-colon and comma? What about using the dash and the hyphen, the apostrophe and quotation marks?
We read mainly to find out what has been written — the content of the writing — but students of English can and should read for other reasons too.
For young learners of English whose first language is Arabic, one of the things to notice when reading is the word order — what goes before a noun — after an adjective — how articles are used and where words like ‘only' and ‘also' fit best in a sentence.
Here is a list of the things that can be noticed whilst you are reading a book or a story. You might be able to think of more.
Let's start by looking at a passage, and seeing what there is to notice about the language that is used in it. This first extract is famous. It is part of the opening of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Things to notice in this short passage
That there are no complete sentences; that the word ‘fog' features 12 times in a passage containing only 64 words; that the passage is about fog, which is everywhere on this particular day, and the effects it has on the various inhabitants of London.
While the content of this passage is not very substantial, Dickens' portrayal of a city paralysed by fog is skillful, and achieved by repetition and by his very graphic mention of the very different types of people and things affected by the fog.
Here's the second passage. What do you notice?
Your brain's right and left side have distinctly different ways of looking at the world. Your two hemispheres are as different from each other as, oh, Michael Wilson and Shirley Maclean.
The left brain controls the right side of the body (this is reversed in about half of the 15 per cent of the population that is left-handed) and, in essence, is logical, analytical, judgemental and verbal. It's interested in the bottom line, in being efficient. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and leans more to the creative, the intuitive.
It is concerned more with the visual and emotional side of life.
What I noticed is that it seems to be addressing me personally, and that the writer has mixed some quite anecdotal, folksy language with some words from quite a different register. The writer uses some idiomatic language (‘the bottom line' — line five)
Compare this with the following passage, which deals with a similar subject.
The two sides of the brain have entirely different functions. The left side controls the right side of the body, and is essentially logical, analytical and judgemental.
The right side, on the other hand, functions to control more creative modes of behaviour, whilst also managing the emotional and visual aspects of life.
The content of the two is basically the same and in some instances identical words are used. However, the tone of the pieces is entirely different. Whereas the first is more personal and addresses the reader directly, the second is much more impersonal and for this reason probably reads as a more serious treatment of the topic. In essence, the registers of the two are very different.
Try this short extract from Charles by Shirley Jackson:
‘How was school today?' I asked, elaborately casual.
‘All right,' he said.
‘Did you learn anything?' his father asked.
Laurie regarded his father coldly. ‘I didn't learn nothing,' he said.
‘Anything,' I said. ‘Didn't learn anything.'
Even though this is a very short extract, some things can be learned from it about the correct way to write dialogue.
A new speaker gets a new line — speech is indented — a capital letter is not necessary after a question mark in direct speech (anything?' his father asked — line three)
And this one from Merriam-Webster's Guide to Punctuation and Style (2001):
The holiday crowds were being entertained by street performers: break dancers, a juggler (who doubled as a sword swallower), a steel-drummer, even a three-card monte dealer.
In this short extract, we learn that in a list of items (break dancers, a juggler, a steel-drummer) dashes that would force a comma to be dropped are often replaced by parenthesis when extra information is included, and that a hyphen is added between some terms but not others (a steel-drummer — a sword swallower).
The point has been made. Reading for content is essential, but students should try to notice things while they read. Just stopping for a second or two to look at something like a semi-colon or a hyphen is enough.
Do it often enough and it wi
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