8 Reasons Why Students Should Still Write Research Papers

Today Te@chthought.com published my article “8 Reasons Why Students Should Still Write Research Papers.”  I hope you take the time to read it.

Click for a Definition

One of the impressive features found on e-reader devices is the ability to click a linked word in the text and get its definition. With Google Chrome’s dictionary extension, double click any word in the text and a definition will pop up in window adjacent to the word.

No more foraging for the illusive Webster’s Dictionary for a definition. Click and the definition appears. Can vocabulary get any easier to learn? It’s fast and efficient, all characteristics of the kind of learning that we value.

Unfortunately, like spell-check programs that can mislead with homonyms and other quirks of human language, automated definitions could mislead rather than clarify by providing only the primary definition without nuanced meanings

Here are a few definitions Google Chrome’s dictionary give in definition pop-up windows:

• “hallmarks of black politics”: a mark stamped on articles of gold, silver, or platinum in Britain, certifying their standard of purity
• “common core questions”: The tough central part of various fruits, containing the seeds
• “perfecting the craft of teaching”: An activity involving skill in making things by hand

Technology can be effective as a tool to learn, not a substitute for learning.

Definition or Translation?

You have to know what you want and what you get when clicking for a definition: do you want the word translated to continue reading the passage, or your vocabulary expanded?

The clicking method has little to do with learning a new word. The more limited one’s vocabulary, the more words on a screen must be clicked and the more frustrating it becomes to understand the text fluently.

The text becomes a foreign language rather than an understandable source of knowledge. Piecing together the fragments of translated sentences distracts from, not enhances learning.

Learning Vocabulary

There are two good ways to learn vocabulary: memorizing definitions and deciphering meaning from context.

As a high school junior, I methodically memorized my way through an SAT vocabulary book to learn the 100 words I needed for the test. Only three new words I learned from that book still stay with me decades later: assiduous, ephemeral, and ostentatious.   Why didn’t I remember more after the test?

Clicking definitions, like memorizing words, enters information into short-term memory. Unless strong, reinforced connections are made to ideas in long-term memory, these words become ephemeral—I still remember that word.

Looking up a word in a dictionary expands vocabulary because it takes effort and time to learn the word. Since I do not want to look up “curtal” more than once, I will reflect on all the meanings and etymology, examine which fits the context of its sentence or the passage, and consider various ways I would use it in different contexts: in other words, I will learn the word.

(A digression: I first encountered “curtal,” meaning shortened, on freerice.com, a worthy website which donates 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program for each correct definition entered on its online vocabulary game; but googling the word led me to the curtal, or shrunken, 11-line sonnet invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I now remember the word thanks to Hopkins’ poetry, not rice.)

A word will connect to experiences, ideas, and feelings stored in memory the same as the smell of baking chocolate chip cookies connects to childhood memories.

But what clicking a definition teaches me about vocabulary is that I can always click for the definition and not ever learn the word, nor even remember that I clicked it 15 times.

Consulting a dictionary for a definition slows down the process of learning and reflecting on a word, but so can googling the word. Search results will link to many nuanced definitions, synonyms, and etymologies, give it a context, and even an audio pronunciation. Like learning from a dictionary, you can examine a word in a variety of ways, browse through related pages, and follow your curiosity by letting ideas and words leap at you. Then you will have that word forever.

Vocabulary from Context

The best way to commit a word to long-term memory is from context. To remember the names of people at a party, you need to see each name written (name tag?), say the name in conversation several times, and find something unforgettable to connect to that person (Paul, the man with the astonishing purple tie whose erudite wife makes profound proclamations about Marcel Proust).

Strong synaptic links through connections and repetition will aid remembering a new word, or a person’s name. Multiple neural pathways that connect the word and context to long-term memory make the word more accessible in a different speaking or writing context.

Adapting the same principle, visual learners acquire vocabulary by mapping or drawing pictures of the word in its context, and kinesthetic learners by acting out the word—all strategies to generate a context for strong and permanent synaptic connections.

The Chicken or the Egg?

It may appear that learning from context rather than from rote memorization is a better method. To the contrary, learning content and vocabulary must go hand in hand. To understand chemistry, you have to know the vocabulary of chemistry; but to learn the vocabulary, you have to connect the words to the concepts and build a knowledge scaffold in long-term memory.

Expanding vocabulary is often a slow, arduous, and inefficient process because the brain requires time to make these long-lasting connections. As a tool to learn vocabulary, technology offers resources to aid our memories and opportunities to emphasize vocabulary learning as a means of content learning.

The key to empowering memory, though, is to make meaning from words and text, not just click for a definition.

Pen and Paper or Keyboard for Note Taking

Which method enhances learning best: taking lecture notes on a keyboard or with pen and paper? A recent study, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand over Laptop Note Taking” by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, concluded that “laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning.”

While typing notes is quicker and facilitates detailed notes, almost a transcription of a lecture, the study showed “…laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

Students learn less because they type the speaker’s every word without integrating the ideas into their thinking.

On the other hand, handwritten note takers write fewer notes but they process the information into their own words, thus performing better on tests at learning facts and higher order concepts, synthesizing information, and storing it in long-term memory to manipulate later.

Because taking notes by hand is not efficient and physically easy, it forces the mind to work hard at writing less by paraphrasing the essence of the information into its own words, sentences, and voice.

How That Works

Whether from reading, listening, or experience, learning is the personal act of changing one’s knowledge of the world by rendering new information in the learner’s own language, understanding and interpretation. The source of that experience—a book, a class discussion, or an afternoon fishing with Grandpa—becomes incorporated into that memory. The more those personal connections are strengthened in long-term memory, the more likely they can be accessed in the future to create new ideas.

Psychologists differentiate between recalling a piece of information and knowing it by feeling that it is true without recollecting how it was learned. Information accessed by recall is a weaker form of memory until it is integrated into long-term memory. Students who have learned information from paraphrasing rely more on what they know than on what they recall.

Mueller and Oppenheimer’s study explained notes taken on laptops resulted in shallower learning from recall: “In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.”

Even when given instructions to avoid taking notes verbatim, students in the study could not defeat the compulsion to do so.

Paraphrasing Text

Taking effective notes while reading electronic or paper sources must entail paraphrasing the text into the reader’s understanding, not just copying it.

While some electronic text formats make highlighting easy, very little information is processed when whole passages turn yellow on the screen with a mindless swipe of a mouse. Annotations, cumbersome to enter on most file formats, are difficult to access for rereading and reflection, which are necessary strategies for engaged learning.

Because highlighting, annotating, rereading and recording important information and ideas in longhand are slow, focused processes, handwritten notes usually are more useful for learning.

Recently Hewlett Packard surveyed graduate and undergraduate students at San Jose State University to determine their preference for print or electronic textbooks and found that 57% preferred print because they could take notes more easily whereas only 3% who preferred electronic textbooks found note-taking easy.

Although publishers offer many textbooks only in an electronic format, students recognize the value of taking paraphrased notes in longhand. Some manufacturers of cases for iPads provide a pocket for the tablet and a convenient pocket for a pad of paper and pen for handwritten notes.

Paraphrasing as Plagiarism Prevention

Copying rather than paraphrasing content from reading, as from listening, can morph into an efficient collection of text copied into a plagiarized paper in the guise of note taking.

The research paper assignment requires students to read and make sense of new information from a variety of sources they have gathered as paraphrased notes. These notes help the writer learn the material and see organizational patterns when synthesizing it from multiple sources. Verbatim copying of text into a paper without interacting with it leads to plagiarism, not learning.

Patchwriting also demonstrates a failure to paraphrase and understand the text. Instead of copying word for word, a writer will patch together the text by making a few changes to the original text—delete a word or phrase, use a synonym, rearrange a phrase. Unlike plagiarism or patchwriting, paraphrase requires the writer’s own vocabulary, sentence structure, voice, and understanding of the essential thought.

To help students transfer the strategies of good note taking into digital environments, research management software for note taking, like PaperToolsPro, should provide two textboxes for taking notes, one to copy the original text and a contiguous one for paraphrasing the focused passage into the researcher’s own words.

When students translate what they have learned and organize the material into their own understanding, they should be able to teach it to their reader in their own words.

What Is at Stake

Anecdotal evidence from teachers and students alike attests that strategies for paper note taking and reading have significant advantages over electronic note taking. However, there is no turning back, no shutting down the electronic devices.

Print-based strategies that have served readers for centuries should not be discarded, but rather transferred to the more difficult digital learning environment in order to suppress the impulse to copy verbatim. Educators need to continue teaching students to paraphrase what they hear and read, connect with what they know, make meaning by seeing patterns of information, construct complex arguments, seek answers for the gaps in their understanding, and be able to explain their new knowledge to others.

While electronic media has many advantages, like making learning tasks fast and efficient, the paraphrasing skills mastered in handwritten notes will best serve learning when students get down to the heavy mental lifting of processing and putting new information into context. For taking notes, the pen is truly mightier than the keyboard.

 

Reading Is More Than Just a Skill

In laboratory science classes, students learn not just science but to be scientists. Like professional scientists, they ask questions, research what other scientists have learned, create a hypothesis, construct experiments to test the hypothesis, analyze data, draw conclusions, and communicate the results. These real-life components to learning science, namely imitating the professionals, makes learning meaningful, authentic, and engaging.

How do students learn to read? Once children learn to decode words, they are taught strategies to preview, predict, skim and scan, search for clues to unknown words, make inferences, create concept maps, paraphrase to check for comprehension. These are vital close reading strategies that good readers need, but is this how “professional readers” read? Avid professional reading is more than the sum of these strategies.

Professional Readers

Were Hemingway and Jefferson successful readers because they mastered these skills? Did Hemingway look for main ideas, preview, predict, skim, and check for comprehension when he read Huckleberry Finn;or did Jefferson create a concept map while reading John Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government?”

What makes “professional” readers successful is their contextual prior knowledge that helps them understand what they are currently reading and add to what they know.

Today, students’ experiences with reading instruction is not necessarily those of professional readers. Because of standardized reading tests, students learn to use these strategies to find the correct answers in one of the given multiple choices, not in their thinking process nor prior knowledge. Therefore, context and divergent thinking have limited relevance to reading for students, though it is paramount for professional readers.

Necessity of Close Reading Skills

Reading skills are necessary to comprehend certain types of dense text that at first read like “Jabberwocky.” Textbooks or passages on reading comprehension tests—where vocabulary, every sentence, and every paragraph has significance to understanding the material—require close reading strategies in order to squeeze out puzzling information.

Some difficult passages in fiction and non-fiction may also demand these kinds of skills. Musicians practice scales and arpeggios in order to master the mechanical skills necessary to give a musical passage the meaning they want to convey.   Similarly, when the text does not make sense, readers can find help to decipher meaning by deferring to these learned strategies.

The Value of Context

Reading well is much more though than instructional strategies because readers should connect and add to their schema of knowledge, feelings, and who they are. Emphasis on strategy instruction turns reading into an exercise, rather than the context creation and engagement necessary to mold life-long readers.

Context is important because writers omit information that readers’ prior knowledge would make redundant.   For example, a Los Angeles Timesarticle opens with: “Elevated levels of lead have been found in the soil of homes and a preschool near a battery recycling plant in Vernon, prompting officials to issue health warnings and order more testing in adjacent neighborhoods.”

The writer assumes readers know that lead is unhealthy to humans especially young children, batteries have lead in them, lead can leak from batteries, and battery recycling plants extract lead from batteries that can leak into nearby soil—all from the first sentence of the article.

No strategy will produce correct answers on a test based on this article if the student does not know about the dangers of recycling batteries. Learned strategies may help coax some meaning out of the article; but it is hard, slow work that distracts from the fluency that connects to long-term memory.

Give students an article of comparable Lexile measure about video games or about a topic they have prior knowledge, and even a student who struggles with the battery recycling article will demonstrate comprehension. What they already know—what is personal and connected to them—enhances comprehension. Reading that requires inefficient and distracting mental processes, with or without success in comprehension, can frustrate students enough to dislike reading. Too many students already leave school hating to read, for 33% of high school graduates and 42% of college graduates never read a book after graduation.

Context is also important for longer text. If Huckleberry Finn were read by students who had no knowledge of slavery and its effects on America, it would merely be a children’s adventure book about a boy without any superpowers going down a river on a raft. Only within its historical and social context does the book become adult fiction important to readers like Hemingway, who recognize its significance to American literature and its lessons in empathy that Jim teaches Huck and the reader.

Where To Find Prior Knowledge

To develop prior knowledge, like about batteries, students need to read broadly from newspapers, magazines, and books, listen to knowledgeable people, and have exposure to rich and varied experiences. Access to classroom, school, and public libraries for sustained silent reading has a direct bearing on reading success because the best way to develop readers is to provide abundant opportunities to experience reading, just as students will learn to swim if provided easy access to a swimming pool.

Students should also have content-rich curricula because reading is literature, science, history, psychology, sociology, geography, art, music, theater, business, mathematics, athletics, even chess. Content-rich curricula, not just reading strategies, will develop good readers who will connect to what they are reading throughout their lives. Jefferson’s extensive prior knowledge of government made him an avid and fluent reader of Locke’s works that then influenced his role in writing the Constitution.

Creating Lifelong Readers

Rich content will teach students to question, adapt to change, analyze and solve problems with creative solutions. Students should be treated as emerging adult readers, not answerers to convergent questions, by immersing them authentic literature, primary sources, science journals, newspapers, literary fiction, as well as the arts—in other words experience a full life.

Like anything else students learn, if they love something, they want to do it and will get better at it. If they don’t enjoy reading, they may still learn to pass tests, but they will never become professional readers.

The goal of reading instruction should be to instill the love of reading in students so that they choose to read beyond what is required, so that they can carve meaning in their lives from their wide reading experiences—and discover the joy of spending an afternoon with a good book.

Fast Track to Plagiarism

The recent brouhaha over Senator Rand Paul’s plagiarism problems makes me wonder if plagiarism will ever go the way of small pox.

Etymologically derived from the Latin plagium, meaning a kidnapping, plagiarism is the kidnapping of someone else’s words and ideas. In a recent speech Senator Paul is accused of kidnapping the Wikipedia plot synopsis of a movie—verbatim without attribution. Plagiarism was further discovered in another speech, a 1,300-word passage in his book Government Bullies, and a Washington Times op-ed article he wrote.

Even more devastating than evidence of his plagiarizing is his refusal to openly acknowledge his mistakes, describe how the plagiarism occurred, and explain what he will do in the future to prevent plagiarism—steps to deal with the plagiarism scandal and make things right.

Instead, he has offered to duel with the “footnote police.”

Unfortunately, not just politicians, but professional researchers, academics, and scholars plagiarize. Retractions of articles in scholarly journals has significantly increased within the last 20 years due to plagiarism.

Online research has put a premium on speed and efficiency in accessing and capturing information.     Much academic reading ends up as quick, efficient sweeps through text that is copied into a draft without comprehending it. Starting at an early age, students master information retrieval, not knowledge formation from close reading. Because plagiarists are interested in the product, not the process—the grade, not the learning—the material passes efficiently from the website to the plagiarized paper without learning taking place. Still, one wonders how difficult a Wikipedia plot synopsis is to comprehend and put in one’s own words.

Inefficient learning should not be seen as unproductive; for engaged, in-depth learning is an arduous process that takes time and effort.

Reading comprehension through annotating, rereading, and reflecting on the text are inefficient but imperative processes to develop linear, hierarchical, and sequential thought patterns. There is no time-saving method to engage in concerted study, imagining new ideas, and creating a complex scaffold of knowledge in long-term memory. There is no quick way to concentrate on ambiguities and ironies in complex text, to track an inductive proof, to parse an article in Chemical Abstracts or Science, a legal or historical document, or read a complex literary work. This kind of in-depth learning can only occur slowly and deliberately. The essence of ethical research is slow, close reading of text.

Because material worthy of research is usually complex, often challenging the reader’s abilities, knowledge, and beliefs, rereading and reflection are required for understanding. Annotating and underlining key ideas and significant or confusing passages encourage pondering text-dependent questions or initiating discussions with one’s peers or teachers. Good readers are also writers of responses and notes to assist their memory. Careful note taking, accurate citations, and connecting each note to a schema of main ideas will enable the researcher to synthesize and manage the information from multiple sources.

Research papers, whether in the format of a student’s term paper, a scholarly article, or a speech, constitute the presentation of this research in the writer’s own words with accurate citations and bibliographies—in other words, without plagiarism.

On the other hand, with little understanding of the text, researchers will copy and paste or patchwrite their papers and blame the “footnote police” for exposing their faulty research process.

We live in a file-sharing culture where copying is a form of flattery and anything accessible online is fair game. Because teaching students to avoid plagiarism is an uphill struggle to change these digital cultural values, ethical research through careful reading, annotation, and attribution must be reinforced across the curriculum whenever research is required. Students must understand the process, feel comfortable with it, monitor their own work, and expect themselves to do the right thing into their adult careers.

When writers value ethical learning and intellectual inquiry, they will not mimic their sources or even copy from Wikipedia. They will have something significant to say and will generate new ideas based on a complex schema of knowledge they have acquired. As participants in the enlightened conversation with the references they cite, they will respect the intellectual property of those sources.

Plagiarism Souvenirs

Most teachers will tell you that when assigned a research paper, students enter a few keywords into a Google search, download some relevant webpages, cut and paste passages into a new document, add a few transitions, and turn it in.  Starting at an early age, they master information retrieval, not knowledge formation, because the material passes from the website to the plagiarized paper without it finding residence in the student’s mind.

With increasing use of online sources for research, students will continue to find it easy to answer a question, but not to understand, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information for the depth of learning needed to write a research paper.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project’s recent report, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World” reveals that students use the following sources to research a topic in order of frequency:

1. Google or other online search engines (94%)
2. Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia (75%)
3. YouTube or other social media sites (52%)
4. Their peers (42%)
5. SparkNotes, CliffNotes, or other study guides (41%)
6. New sites or major news organizations (25%)
7. Print or electronic textbooks (18%)
8. Online databases such as EBSCO, JSTOR, or Grolier (17%)
9. A research librarian at their school or public library (16%)
10. Printed books other than textbooks (12%)
11. Student-oriented search engines such as Sweet Search (10%)

While the first five sources may offer a broad overview of a topic, they are not conducive to academic research because they lack the rigor and depth of information to challenge students intellectually, as the last six sources could.  While Google offers Google Scholar search engine for scholarly sources, it is buried on Google’s home page.  Alongside Maps, YouTube, and Gmail at the bottom of <More’s> pull-down menu, <Even More> links to a page where Google Scholar appears toward the bottom below Google Shopping.  The Scholar and associated scholarly searches are interred six feet under, so to speak, in Google.

With a superficial understanding of the material researched from superficial sources, students don’t invest time and effort into searching for an in-depth understanding of their topic.  Instead they are satisfied copying unprocessed information into their paper from sites like Wikipedia or Cliff Notes.  Using those first five sources is like wearing a souvenir t-shirt rather than experiencing the real event.  Unfortunately, too many student papers provide plagiarized souvenirs from the first five sources and not enough learned material they understand.

A recent policy statement “Using Evidence in Writing” by the National Council of Teachers of English stated that students often plagiarize for reasons other than dishonesty.  They lack a background in the topic they are researching, the reading comprehension skills for complex texts, the confidence to communicate in their own voice, and the ability to integrate researched information into their papers.

Plagiarism has received its share of attention, but another indication that information is retrieved without knowledge formation is patchwriting, the attempt at paraphrasing that rearranges words and phrases, substitutes synonyms for original words, or deletes a word from the sentence.  A paraphrase that is patchwriting is not the student’s own words, syntax, and voice, nor does it give evidence of the student’s understanding the text well enough to explain it.

These issues beg an educational, not merely a technology solution.  Teachers and librarians need to model researching by directing students to scholarly sources written by noted specialists in their field.  Often these are found in books vetted by responsible, academic publishers who print significant and credible works by recognized experts, and in vetted journal articles accessed from subscription databases like EBSCO or JSTOR.

A Google search for <narrator of Great Gatsby> will yield a list of online articles—the first links to SparkNotes, most are unsigned and lack depth, and some are websites that sell research papers on that topic.  Not available from a simple Google search, Wikipedia article, YouTube, Facebook, or Cliff Notes are critical essays such as those found in Prentice Hall’s 1968 Twentieth Center Interpretations of The Great Gatsby: A Collection of Critical Essays, which includes analytical essays like “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” “The Theme and Narrator of The Great Gatsby,” and others by recognized critics like Ernest Lockridge, Maxwell Perkins, Edith Wharton, Lionel Trilling, and Fitzgerald’s daughter.

The research paper is not just an assignment, but a commitment to continual dialog between teachers and students about their research, with teachers exploring their students’ understanding, interpretation, and synthesis of their reading, discussing their choice of sources and note taking strategies, and evaluating their work throughout the process.  This dialog must include frequent modeling of paraphrasing and summary skills in contrast to patchwriting. Students perform best when learning is valued, not just grades.

Digital technologies and electronic sources have provided another learning medium, not a substitute for the print world where material from generations of scholars resides.  Students need to be multi-textual—able to find and read critical and credible information from all media and be able to explain what they have learned in documented research papers.

This is the Digital Age of information retrieval; it needs to become knowledge formation.  This can only happen when education becomes an invitation to the 5000-year conversation between the learned and those who want to learn—a collaborative endeavor between experts, teachers, and students.  We want students to be engaged, deep learners, not just to wear the t-shirt.

Why Read World Literature

Students arrive in American schools from around the world, some as refugees fleeing conflict, violence, prejudice, or dire poverty, many with harrowing stories, and some from highly technologically advanced urban centers.  While language and cultural differences can be challenging, this diversity in student populations offers everyone an opportunity to develop the capacity to experience the humanity of others.

Many times immigrant students are reticent about discussing their previous experiences, about being different, about integrating into a new world while retaining their identity.  Teachers may not even know what questions to ask.

However, writers who speak from around the world can be these students’ voices.  As in Kyung-Sook Shin’s best-selling novel in Korea, Please Look After Mother, readers wander the streets of ultramodern Seoul in search of a lost aging mother; but we find that her adult children, who enjoy the benefits of Seoul’s economic and technological prosperity, are also lost psychologically.  Through the guidance of this Korean writer, readers can empathize with Korean immigrants who come from the most wired city in the world where K-pop culture is challenging traditional family values.  Or readers tread the perilous divide between past and present in the dual worlds of immigrant students by reading Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, a novel about a Vietnamese family who escapes the war but leaves grandfather behind.

For twelve years I have taught Reading Around the World, a staff development class for high school teachers.  Having read 80 fiction and non-fiction works of world literature since the class began, attending teachers understand how this literature has instilled a sensitivity, an empathy, toward their foreign students and helped their entire class care about the world beyond their experiences.

Because American readers tend to choose familiar popular fiction and non-fiction over foreign literary fiction, our group remains small.  We do not read from popular best seller lists –though Please Look After Mother sold over 1 million copies in Korea; we read books by authors from countries like Iran, Puerto Rico, and Brazil.

Research about Reading Literary Fiction

Recent research by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano at The New School for Social Research has demonstrated through fMRI scans that there are significant outcomes to reading literary fiction over other literature, outcomes that my teachers who read around the world understand.  The scans, which measure the amount of blood that flows to parts of the brain while engaged in specific activities, detected where in the brain the emotions toward others, or empathy, reside.  These areas become active when the subjects read literary fiction, but not when they read popular fiction or non-fiction.

Literary fiction specifically develops our knowledge of others by relating to the humanity we share with the characters.  Unlike popular fiction that confirms readers’ expectations, literary fiction challenges readers’ beliefs.  Readers experiencing cognitive dissonance hold an internal conversation with the author, characters, and themselves to refine or confirm their beliefs, or to pursue new ideas in order to understand another’s point of view.

Unlike popular fiction that focuses on what happens next in the story, literary fiction is interested in what it is to be a human being.  It prompts readers to search for implied meanings and to observe the world simultaneously through multiple perspectives, through the subjective experiences of a character, or through an unreliable narrator.

Because the inner lives of complex individuals are not overtly divulged in real life, readers must depend on multiple strategies to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters from their actions, dialog, and descriptions of body language.  Developing these skills through reading literary fiction trains us to be sensitive and empathetic toward our encounters with real people.  Fiction can prepare us to look others in the eye and listen to their stories. With each moral dilemma a character encounters, we can rehearse how we would act, think, and feel, and what others must feel.  Life is not a dress rehearsal, but serious fiction is.

Because readers of popular fiction do not extend themselves into the humanity of the characters but only into the plot with like-minded characters, their reading does not foster empathy. The fMRI scans show that reading non-fiction, or not reading at all, provides the same results as reading popular fiction.

Worldly Readers

Readers of literary fiction from around the world understand these research results.  In 2012 journalist Ann Morgan decided to read a book from each of the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations plus Taiwan because she realized she was reading only English-speaking authors.  Readers of her blog provided her authors and titles from countries like Comoros, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, some works already in English, other short fiction translated for her.

Not simply travelogues, these works, she discovered, led her to “inhabiting the mental space of the storytellers.”  With Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden, she observed exotic temples as a local Buddhist would; she meandered through Mongolia’s Altai Mountains with a shepherd boy; she attended a religious festival in Myanmar guided by a transgender medium.  She saw the world through the writers’ eyes, scrutinized the nitty-gritty of characters’ lives in other places.  But especially these 196 works “opened my heart to the way people there feel.”  Unlike reading news reports, she found herself connected to a world that was no longer exotic, but filled with all familiar emotions of fear, sorrow, and joy.  “At its best, I learned, fiction makes the world real.”  Readers searching for these experiences through literary fiction might peruse Ann Morgan’s 196-title list to begin their own journey.

As the research suggests, reading literary fiction is a tribute to expanding our humanity, to events that we may never encounter, and to experience what others think and feel. Literary fiction can transport us figuratively into someone else’s shoes—shoes worn by a character in a book, by the students in a classroom, or the person next to you.  Without empathy, we have an incomplete picture of their humanity and our own.

Should I Get a Paper or Online Subscription?

After a several-year hiatus from reading New York Review of Books, I finally ordered a print subscription.  My first copy will arrive at the end of January.  Although I read many publications online, I chose the print version—the one that I can hold in my hands, fold, safely initiate with coffee rings, keep open to where I left off, and without battery dependency—because it makes that extra cup of breakfast coffee even tastier.

Although some of the articles are not my forte, I enjoy starting at the beginning of the issue and reading my way through every article until I read the letters to the editor and the provocative personal ads at the end.  By then, the next issue usually appears in my mailbox.  Because this publication coaxes me to read in-depth articles covering topics even of negligible interest to me, I have a broader view of the world.

Since I must wait until the end of January to flavor my morning coffee, I went to the NYRB website to read some old issues I missed, to which as a subscriber I have access, and prepared to relive the cerebral delights I remembered from the past.

But what happened?

I began reading an article in the December 19, 2013 issue, after a few paragraphs went to another article, did the same, almost finished “Rome: Sex & Freedom” by Peter Brown (now why didn’t I finish it?), and generally bounced around the articles.

Why do I troll the online issue, but read assiduously from paper?

Reading from a paper copy, I am a scaffold builder, a “languager,” a thinker.  I transfer decoded words into ideas that connect to what I know and who I am.  The paper copy is all I have in front of me, a kind of closed network, just as the coffee in my cup has emptied the pot and it is all I have left to savor.  I slowly, carefully eat up the words, follow the writer’s thought process, speculate where the next paragraph will go, ask questions of the writer that I hope he answers or maybe makes irrelevant with more information, more insights, more revelations.  I do not count the number of pages left, not even care how long the article is, or stop reading as I turn the page—I often hope parts of the author’s draft were not edited out for reasons of space.  I am engrossed in the ideas and words that are cavorting through my synapses—even if the topic is of scant interest to me.

Reading from the screen, however, I am a spectator of words and ideas.  As if in an open network, I skip between and within articles, searching for something tastier rather than meatier.  The paragraphs are too long, not short 1-2 sentence paragraphs found on blogs.  Subconsciously, I begin to think about the surface of the words; I see words as a slush of letters, not the ocean to dive into for pearls.

A Conversation

An important part of reading is the conversation I have with myself in setting a purpose, in snatching context from my long-term memory.  I think about how this article may change or enhance my perspective, challenge my beliefs and perceptions, maybe profoundly change who I am.  I inhabit what I am reading by simulating the thought process of the writer, willingly connecting to the writer.

Because in my conversation with myself I choose to read the whole issue, almost every article to the end, I lose myself in reading from paper, but I feel distanced from the screen text.  Instead of the interior conversation centering on the content of the reading, it focuses on the decoding process and on the trivialities of the text on the page.  I look for ways to get off the page:  links or clicks for a definition; a quick check of my email, the weather, or the price of gold in Tangiers.  I jump around rather than read sequentially.  I join the 84% of screen readers who read words, sentences, and paragraphs out of sequence and read only 18% of the text.

And then there are the ads.  Although publications, paper or electronic, are loaded with ads, my electronic copy of NYRB is stripped of any.  Unlike the detestable ads for mattresses, anti-aging creams, and car dealerships that interrupt my reading pleasure, the ads in the paper NYRB are about books from usually small or independent publishers.  Because I no longer live near a good book store (I did find one 330 miles away in Traverse City, Michigan, this summer), the ads replace the counters of newly published books I would find in a respectable bookstore.  Though the ads won’t let me finger the books, they let me know what publishers are bringing to the market.  Sure, I can find a particular title on Amazon, but the publishers’ ads are the next best thing to the antiquated art of browsing books.

I do have to admit that the art work views on my Retina screen with 2880×1800 resolution surpasses newsprint and ink.

So I await my first paper copy to enjoy and genuinely read with my morning coffee.  Until then I will struggle with reading back issues online.

The Art of Slow Reading: A Review

The November 2013 issue of English Journal published my review, “A Review of The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk.  You can access it online free.  I would love comments from anyone who has read the book.

Dictation Software, a Lifeline for Students

I recently became familiar with Dragon Dictation, voice-to-text (also known as voice recognition) software, when my husband’s speech therapist used it to assist him after his recent stroke.  He could speak words, phrases, and sentences, and it would accurately type on the screen what it heard, thus giving him feedback on his pronunciation.

Immediately I saw it as an educational tool that could remove barriers that prevent some students from reaching their potential.  First in my thoughts was Jonathan, an AP student I had years ago whose clear and insightful comments inspired class discussions, but who was unable to express that same quality thinking in a coherent essay.  After struggling with this composition problem into his senior year in high school, a reading teacher realized that his thinking was by far faster than his ability to hand write or type his ideas.  He turned into an outstanding writer once we had him dictate his essays into a tape recorder and then transcribe them on paper.  Not only was he able to express himself clearly and fully, but he no longer felt the frustration and anxiety of slowing down his thinking in order to express pieces of his ideas.  And no longer did he submit papers unworthy of his critical and creative mind.  I hope he has discovered voice recognition software because it will transcribe his words directly from his speech.

Students with dyslexia can also benefit from voice recognition software.  While usually considered a reading disability, dyslexia also affects students’ ability to express themselves in writing.  Frustrated that they cannot write the same discerning, complex ideas that they are thinking, they find their competence questioned by others and even themselves.

Dyslexic students have difficulty progressing beyond merely decoding their thoughts as individual words.  They focus on spelling and forming letters correctly while simultaneously trying to remember what they want to say.  Often they resort to simple vocabulary and less developed compositions than they would express in speech.  Because their typing is slow and laborious, they often diminish the intellectual level of their content and analysis.  Thus, their readers never realize the significance of their thoughts in writing.

Note taking can also be difficult for dyslexic students because they are unable to write usable notes fluently while learning the material.  Often they are provided with a dedicated scribe to help them with class notes and homework assignments.

Voice recognition software avoids this bottle neck to the thinking process because dyslexic students do not have to deal with putting words, misspelled or otherwise, on paper, painfully, one at a time.   They can become independent, fluent writers who demonstrate their true proficiencies.

Many iPhone users have discovered the convenience of Siri voice recognition software, which lets them dictate messages, notes, and more, in order to convert the spoken words to typed words.  For anyone challenged with dyslexia, voice recognition software can be empowering, not merely a convenience.

Software suggested by members of The International Dyslexia Association, Dragon Dictation is available for purchase on a computer or as a free download on iPads and Android tablets.  Apple’s most recent OS X Mountain Lion operating system has built in comparable voice recognition capabilities.   To make speech to text easy with the current software, merely insert the curser into any text editor or word processing page or textbox where you want the text to appear and either type or speak it in.

This method can be especially helpful for students doing research for a paper.  In the struggle to take notes from research sources, students can mistakenly copy from sources and submit plagiarized papers.  As students take notes and document sources, they can dictate information into software like PaperToolsPro to record their notes and bibliography entries as quickly as they can say it.   When the output can approximate their thinking process, students can focus on the ideas they are reading and recording, on the connections between what they know and what they have just learned, and on the significance and value of new information—not on their frustration at typing words correctly.  As a result, students can produce papers that reflect their best understanding and that avoid plagiarism.

Dictation software levels the learning field for students with certain writing challenges.  They now have the potential to express themselves as fluently as other students.