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Once upon a time, there was deep reading

Deep reading, or deep literacy, is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to… bear original insight.

Deep reading has in large part informed our development as humans, in ways both physiological and cultural. And it is what ultimately allowed [people to become] capable of self-government.

Deep reading has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy.

Today, instead…

Deep reading is in danger. Few cognitive scientists doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans.

But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.

What is this post anyway?

This post is the shortest possible summary I could make of a crucial essay on the erosion of deep reading, as a public service for people who… struggle to deep read. Which, in case you had not noticed, means almost everybody these days (including me, sometimes).

If you are unable to deep read, or think it’s for losers, you have a deep problem. Seriously.