Reading is an acquired skill – we have to learn to read. The earliest record of written language (an organised system of symbols) is somewhere around 4000 BC. And as a skill for the masses, it is only a few centuries old. The invention of the printing press in the middle of the last millennium placed reading at the centre-stage of learning – it democratised access to content.
At the most basic level, when we read we scan the images of the symbols of the language we are reading in, in a serial manner (left to right or vice versa). The magic of reading lies in ‘what’ we scan as one unit – each letter of a word, each word of a sentence, each sentence of a paragraph, or each paragraph of a page (voracious readers are thought ‘to read a paragraph at a glance’.
Our eyes jump from image to image as we read; the images we scan are called saccades. The jumps or saccades are very small if we ‘scan/read each letter of the words’, somewhat longer if we ‘scan/read a word at a time’, longer if we ‘scan/read a sentence at a time’ and really long if we ‘scan/read a paragraph at a time’.
Expectedly, competent readers make forward and longer saccades while the poor/weaker readers make backward and shorter saccades (they often repeat what they read as they cannot ‘process words’ together for meaning).
How does one become a competent reader? By reading volumes of texts and keep reading more volumes, as a matter of habit! We increase the size of saccades by reading more volumes of text! We become better readers
by reading varied genres of text. We must read texts with longer, bigger and complex plots. Newspapers and magazines are for the novices to build rudimentary reading skill.
The more we read, the more the words become familiar in scanning and we make longer saccades.
You need proof of the aforementioned explanation of how we read?
Here it is. Try reading the text below. The faster your speed in reading the text below, the better the reader you are.
Jumbled Text
You wnduo’t bvleiee taht you culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht you are rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor ahceievd by parctcnig rdnaieg oevr the yaers, you can ‘sacn /raed wrod’. It dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae yuor mnid is not rdnaieg ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh?
Actual Text
You wouldn’t believe that you could actually understand what you are reading. Using the incredible power achieved by practicing reading over the years, you can ‘scan/read word’. It doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can read it without a problem. This is because your mind
does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole. Amazing, huh?
Was it fun! You always thought spelling was very important for reading! It is, but, for someone expert at reading, words are just images in anticipation of the meaning of the sentence or the larger context of the text. Try the text on your friends.
To sum, reading is a skill and like all skills it also takes continuous and increasingly rigorous ‘practice’/performance to keep improving it.
