When I was younger, I’d curl up on the couch in my living room with a book, usually a Harry Potter one I had read before, and disappear into its fictional world for hours at a time. Opening up a book was like travelling somewhere new in my mind. I could be a crime solving sleuth or a magical witch or the child of an Olympian god. Reading books took me to places unfathomable in the physical world and gave me temporary alter egos I’d never realize in my own lifetime. Now a decade later, books play a much different role. (How do I make this transition less awkward?)
“Teens today don’t read books anymore.” You hear it everywhere. Parents, teachers, older siblings, librarians. Could it be true that slowly but surely people are leaving books behind? A study in the Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults found that this might, in fact, be true. It found that of the 17-year old age group, only 9% are readers, compared to 19% twenty years ago. Young adults, ages 18 to 24, are seeing the steepest drops, at a rate of decline 55% higher than the overall adult population. This begs the question, what is it that is affecting teens so much? This study claims that technology may in fact be to blame for this dramatic shift. Nowadays, young adults spend on average two hours a day watching TV, and even more surfing the Internet or social networking, yet only seven minutes on leisurely reading. The fast rise of all our available technologies is hitting teens and young adults the hardest, taking away their attention and diverting their interest from books. And as it stands, this problem could be bigger than just a lack of the momentary escape I found in books as a child.
The lack of leisurely reading and decline of reading overall have been shown to reduce the level of reading comprehension in students. This poses not only an academic problem, but one that can affect them beyond the classroom. “The goal of reading is derive meaning.” Without comprehension, reading is just following words on a page. Regardless of what the purpose for reading is, reading comprehension skills are crucial for gathering information and deriving meanings from the words on the page. Without an adequate level of reading comprehension, daily living and work could prove difficult to manage. (How do I transition better here?) Moreover, it has been found that reading is a “multifaceted process that develops only with practice.” While fluency and word recognition can be learned in a few years, true reading comprehension is an ongoing learning-by-doing process. The decline in reading of youth, teens, and young adults takes away from the crucial practice to build such skills and could eventually produce a decreased level of reading comprehension. Developing strong reading comprehension skills is essential for a rich academic, professional, and personal life. It allows for students and growing youth to develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally. And, it could all be lost in the next few decades.
It’s not to say that just because the youth of today don’t enjoy reading nearly as much as their 1980’s or 1990’s counterparts they are doomed to futures without meaning. But, it is to say that there is an increasingly concerning issue that could have implications more serious than just a loss of the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds and characters every now and then. The rate of decline that we are now seeing in today’s teens is a special cause for concern. One that pushes us to think of what replacing hours with a book with hours of TV and Internet can be doing to our overall quality of life. Today we may not see a huge change, but five, ten, twenty years from now we might see huge changes in our youth, changes that may not be positive. So, I urge you, my peers, to try to start the cycle of change now. After all, reading is power and surfing the web is just procrastination. Take a break from your homework, your Facebook page, or that hilarious YouTube video that went viral two days ago. Exit this page, pick up a book, and get lost in its world, if only for a few minutes. You won’t regret it.
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I really like this essay! I also really like your opening paragraph. I think if you just say how books play a much different role then the transition would be less awkward and it would show a nice comparison and strengthen your argument. Overall I think your argument is one almost everyone can relate too who read as a child and that makes your tone and your essay very enjoyable, good job!
Gina, I liked the structure of your essay. I liked how you started off with a personal story, talked about the status quo of reading, and then discussed why reading is important. For the last sentence in your first paragraph, I think you could lengthen that sentence and make it your thesis. That would give your essay a concrete foundation to launch from. Like Michael mentioned, I think it would be good to explain why people are not reading as much lately. Also, I think it would have wrapped up your essay nicely if you described exactly what the solution to this problem might be. This seems to be a societal problem and so maybe a societal solution is necessary (instead of just us students in ENGL 120W). Overall, I really liked your essay in how you approached the topic of reading.
I think that the overall thesis is somewhere in the fact that people are spending less and less time reading and more time watching TV. Right now this essay says that people watch TV instead of reading, and this could easily take the argument a step further and explore why people watch TV instead of reading. As for the time you ask about a transition in paragraph 3, I think that you could even make that a new paragraph because its claim seems to be that reading is power, which is different from the beginning of the paragraph that reading comprehension is declining.
I really liked your argument in this essay. It is a problem I think everyone has noticed, but not a lot of people talk about. I also really liked your last paragraph which provided a solution to this problem. I do think your thesis could be more explicitly stated in the first paragraph. You hint at it by saying that the books play a much different role these days, but that doesn’t fully encapsulate the argument you are trying to make. Expanding this might help that transition that you were asking about as well. Overall, good job!