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Brandon Adams
Mrs. DeBock
English 4 Honors
March 3, 2015
People Should Take Time to Read More
The startling and dramatic decrease in reading is cause for great concern. The problem
with a decrease in reading stems from the school systems and has the potential to hurt the
education of future generations. Future generations may suffer from the lack of literary
knowledge, the problem is that people should take time to read more.
The first issue is that the problem stems from a lack of reading education in grade school.
This data has shown The decline was especially great among the youngest people surveyed,
ages 18 to 24. Only 43 percent had read any literature in 2002, down from 53 percent in 1992.
(Huge Decline In Book Reading.). There is much worry as to how to change the way children
are educated, it is an area of study that has a lot of data. Children, along with most adults are
more and more impatient by the year. The problem with books is the sheer time it takes to read
and that sounds unappealing to most people with little attention spans. Most kids would rather
surf the internet or watch tv for a few hours rather than taking some time to sit down and read a
good book.
The second major problem is the data from a study done recently by the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted the largest literary reading study ever in
2004 Among the respondents, 47 percent reported having read literature in the previous year,

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a decline of 7 percent from 1992. (Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in

America").This kind of data suggests that the overall population has lost some of its readers. The
future generations have a risk of further decreasing in readers. The problem with reading is the
time consumption and in a day and age where any answer can be found in seconds by typing it in
the computer. The days of retiring to a study and reading a novel might not ever be a normality
again.
The third thought about the problem is that people are reading more but on a different
medium. The world has changed and books seem too many to be an antiquated way of reading.
So many people have shifted from books to computer screen. It is difficult to exactly tell how
much people read on the internet because of varied and sporadic use. The overall rate of reading
of adults has been lacking Only 47 percent of American adults read "literature" (poems, plays,
narrative fiction) in 2002, a drop of 7 points from a decade earlier. Those reading any book at all
in 2002 fell to 57 percent, down from 61 percent. (Huge Decline In Book Reading.)Many
people have stopped reading in favor of television and online videos, there is many brain use
differences from listening and reading, unlike traditional book reading it is uncertain the brain
use difference between reading and listening. As mentioned by Anne Cunningham and Keith
Stanovich Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of lifting
meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are reciprocal and
exponential in nature. Accumulated over time spiraling either upward or downward they
carry profound implications for the development of a wide range of cognitive capabilities (What
Reading Does for the Mind).
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People should take time to read more, reading dates back thousands of years and the
dawn of civilization, the medium since then may have changed but should still remain as a great
treasure. The use of books as a medium dates back to Guttenberg and the risk of literary skills
and understanding rise every year.