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In Favor of Reading Aloud

When I read Jane Eyre, I stalled for a full year between the opening part at the boarding school and the rest of the book. I tend to dislike boarding-school openings in books, but the real problem was I found myself having to reread too many of Charlotte Brontë’s winding, multi-clausal, colon-encrusted sentences. Her writing is beautiful, but some sentences

I tend to dislike boarding-school openings in books, but the real problem was I found myself having to reread too many of Charlotte Brontë’s winding, multi-clausal, colon-encrusted sentences. Eventually, a social shift towards individualism and privacy, the advent of public education systems, and more reader-friendly typesetting practices pushed the trend toward silent reading as the norm. When you don’t just comprehend, but pronounce the ideas in the text, you put yourself in a better position from which to connect with the author’s mind, which is arguably the whole point of reading.

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