Editorial: The Lost Art of Reading

Attitudes towards reading have changed through the years, doubtless to the detriment of American intellect. Gone are the halcyon days when reading was a pleasurable activity to be savored—an act from which one knew he could derive some intellectual benefit. Today, to many, reading has become an ordeal; a labor to be performed perfunctorily; an obstacle to be surmounted. In my view, this development is most troubling within academia, where reading should arguably be most valorized but where it is instead quickly becoming a lost art.

Elementary observation indicates that students increasingly approach mandatory course readings with a cavalier attitude, not infrequently resorting to a brisk skim—if they choose to read at all. I am advised that ChatGPT (I still don’t understand how it works) has a “summarization” feature for scholarly articles that serves as a recourse for a certain type of student. As for classic texts, such as novels and philosophical tracts, classroom discussion (or lack thereof) serves to suggest that SparkNotes and other online platforms remain perpetual workarounds to actual reading. In still other instances, students just come to class patently devoid of any familiarity whatsoever with assigned readings.

Then of course there’s that small, inconvenient matter of having to obtain texts in the first place. Heaven forbid a professor not only fails to provide a scan but assigns a specific physical edition. Worse yet is if an edition needs to be acquired through interlibrary loan or by special order. Many students won’t bother to procure such a text before the term begins and, when they finally get around to the task of seeking it out, will ignore the request for a specific edition. Some will choose to belatedly find online an “epub” of unformatted text, which always makes me wonder how exactly they intend to cite page numbers in the essays that they’ll soon be asked to produce.

All of this is hardly to speak well of Dartmouth students, but (for better or worse) friends at other Ivy League schools confirm that such trends pervade their institutions too. We may thus conclude that the problem underlying the situation that I describe lies less with students themselves than with the institutions they attend, which appear to have a lackadaisical commitment to inculcating curiosity and studiousness. Disheartening though this finding may be, it is perhaps unsurprising that elite schools are failing to live up to the ideals of which they were once exponents. To be sure, Harvard—as we have seen in recent weeks as regards its president—is hardly a bastion of academic standards in the modern day.

A close consideration suggests that the topography of reading in academia may be considered derelict on several counts. First, students’ failure to read required texts adequately, or at all, is too often met with no material consequences. And so students are encouraged to continue.

Second, I submit that good reading habits can be molded and cultivated by pleasurable reading—which requires the sort of texts that, when you read them, you understand what’s being said. Increasingly, these are not the sort of scholarly articles that populate course syllabi. Indeed, a mounting problem with modern scholarly works is that they’re written in plodding academese, the sort of “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words” of which Orwell warned in his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946). The linguist John McWhorter has plainly conceded that, with few exceptions, scholarship, itself “weird and often gestural,” frequently goes unread by other academics. That’s a very poor model to set for students, but it’s also clear that scholar and student alike find modern academic output a tedious read. 

Finally, university administrators (certainly Dartmouth’s administrators) often seem incapable of understanding what constitutes a grammatically correct sentence. In the messages that they dispatch to the “Dartmouth community,” their emphasis is always on big ideas, and an examination of small details or language in one of their messages will typically render it confusing. In fact, reading an administrator’s email message in depth is often a horrifying experience. Any number of administrators have fallen foul of the rules of basic English. Sentence fragments, poorly placed adverbs and prepositions, and failure to observe subject-verb agreement are errors that complicate what is doubtless intended to be straightforward. And these errors teach students that swift, superficial reading is an appropriate course to pursue.

It is accepted wisdom that one of the best means by which to improve your writing is to read. Students, academics, and administrators all need to read more—and to read better material. Reading is an art that ought to be a second nature.