How much reading do we expect university students to do? In 2000, it was reported that only about one-third were completing their reading assignments. That number had dropped from more than 80 percent in the early 1980s. (I shudder to think what the percent is in 2015.) Average time spent studying has also shriveled over the past half-century: from about 24 hours a week in the early 1960s to a skimpy 15 hours now.
Let’s be fair to students: How much reading are faculty members doing? Given variation across fields, along with individual practices, that’s a hard figure to pin down. What we can observe is a shift, at least in some fields, in how much time we spend reading academic articles. A longitudinal study of faculty journal-reading habits reported that while scientists are reading more articles annually, the average time devoted to each piece decreased from 48 minutes in 1977 to 31 minutes in 2005.
What’s changed over the years? Undergraduates come from increasingly diverse educational backgrounds, and their obligations for jobs and internships have ballooned (scarfing up time otherwise available for reading). As for professors, we’re scurrying to publish and apply for external funding, not to mention having ever-larger service obligations. But the shift is about more than time spent reading. The way we read has substantially moved from print to digital screens.
Compared with print, what’s so different about reading on a digital device, be it a computer, an e-reader, a tablet, or a mobile phone? When reading on-screen, we can rapidly click or scroll our way from page to page within a document. We are able to connect with the outside world, to hop from site to site, to multitask. Sustained concentration, analysis, and rereading are not encouraged. Electronic devices are excellent helpmates for searching and skimming. (Who among us would part with the “find” function?) With the exception of e-readers that are built sans Internet connection, digital devices constitutionally discourage linear, continuous reading.
Screens work handily for most short pieces or for content we don’t intend to ponder. However, e-reading tends to be a poor fit for longer works (especially heavy-duty nonfiction and literature demanding close reading) or even short ones meriting serious thought. Since universities are the traditional home of reflective reading, the rise of reading on-screen has profound implications for how we read—and, in fact, how we write.
To understand what changed, start with a telling acronym: tl;dr.
We power browse, we snippet read, We see more texts but give them shorter shrift. We are redefining what it means to read.
That paragon of modern lexicography, Urban Dictionary, tells us the expression means “Too long; didn’t read. Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading.” But tl;dr isn’t just a commentary on blog-posting nerds. Rather, it characterizes the way students and faculty members alike approach reading on computer-based devices.
Take web pages. How long do you spend reading them? As of early 2013, Nielsen pegged the average in the United States at one minute, 12 seconds. But many “visits” are much briefer. A study from 2008 found that almost 50 percent of users lingered less than 12 seconds. If you’re breezing through web pages, are you actually reading them? Jakob Nielsen (a different Nielsen, this one an expert on how people use the web) says no: “People rarely read web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found … only 16 percent read word-by-word.” Nielsen estimates that given the amount of time users spend, on average, on a web page, they read at most 28 percent of the words—he thinks 20 percent is probably a more accurate figure.
If web users are scanning rather than reading, what kind of scanning are they doing? Using eye-tracking studies, Nielsen concluded that “the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F.” Readers usually start in the upper left-hand corner and chug across the page to the right. As they work down the page, people view less and less of what’s on the right-hand side. By the time they reach the bottom (assuming they get that far), essentially they are processing only what is in the lower left-hand corner.
What about scanning patterns on subsequent screens (“pages”) of an online site (or, to use a newspaper analogy, “below the fold”)? Not a particularly relevant question, since most readers don’t get there. Nielsen’s data show that web users spend about 80 percent of their time reading what is on the initial page (“above the fold”).
When university students and scholars read on-screen, do they behave differently from the general public? It seems not. Research at University College London analyzed how academics approach text on digital devices. The investigators described the observations not as reading but rather as “power browsing.” The study went on to suggest, “It almost seems that [readers] go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
Many of our students have become experts in minimalist reading. Take the young woman who bitterly complained that an article I had uploaded to our course website was the “wrong” version. What had happened? Since my library lacked an electronic subscription to the relevant journal, I had gone to the trouble of scanning my own copy and then posting the file. But here’s the rub: While the “find” function works on digitally native texts, it’s useless with scanned files. In essence the student was saying she had no intention of reading the entire article to figure out how to respond to the discussion prompt I had given. Instead, she looked to follow her regular practice when reading materials online: search for some key words, read a few lines above and below, and be done.
Was she short on time, attention span, or both? It’s hard to say. What I know for sure is that reading on-screen is fostering a “snippet” approach to the written word.
Students aren’t entirely to blame. Computers (and now tablets and mobile phones) are technologies encouraging what I call reading on the prowl. Yes, it’s possible to settle in for the evening to consume a work from start to finish on a digital device, but skimming and scanning are oh-so-easy, and if there’s an Internet connection, the siren call of on-screen distractions challenges our ability to stay focused. Often we justify our reduced reading by saying we don’t have enough time for full-sized helpings.
At least since the 19th century, time has been a Western obsession. The era brought the railroad and the pocket watch, along with standardization of the 24-hour cycle. “Running on time” became a matter of good business practice and, in the case of the railroads, a necessity, since you needed to keep trains from crashing into one another. Lest someone attempt to convince you that time pressures are an affliction of just the late 20th or early 21st century, remember the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or watch Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
One solution to the perceived time crunch is to read faster. In his prime, the literary critic Harold Bloom was reputed to zip through 400 pages an hour. In comparison, the rest of us mortals are more likely to plod along at maybe 30-ish to 60-ish, depending upon the nature of the text and type of reader. While speed-reading has a longer and broader history (and has counted among its practitioners Theodore Roosevelt and John Kennedy), the technique gained wide traction when a Salt Lake City high-school teacher and her husband started Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Dynamics in 1959.
The popularity of speed-reading crested before the end of the 20th century, though sporadic moves to resurrect it keep popping up. A recent article in Forbes asks, “Do You Read Fast Enough to Be Successful?” There is also the World Speed Reading Council, which sponsors a World Champion Speed Reader contest. The 2007 record holder zipped through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at an average rate of 4,251 words per minute, apparently polishing off the book in 47 minutes and one second.
A new speed-reading approach is called Spritz. This digital app flashes one word on the screen at a time, with the company claiming that the tool can accelerate your reading speed from a basic 250 words per minute to 400 without compromising comprehension. Admirably, the chief executive, Frank Waldman, distinguishes between what Spritz is good for (like mobile news) and what it’s not: “You wouldn’t really want to read classic lit or Shakespeare.”
The other solution to the time crunch is to read less. It makes sense that we can facilitate reduced reading by shortening the length of what we write—or at least abbreviating the amount of text we offer readers at one time. Short—and shortened—texts have a long history in the modern West. Book reviews were created in the mid-18th century, when Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review began providing readers “some idea of a book before they lay out their money and time on it.” Serialization of longer works (from Smollett’s History of England to Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop) gave readers a portion that could be consumed in a single sitting—a technique that has become increasingly popular in today’s digital world.
When we give students ever-shorter reading assignments we imply that complex texts aren’t worth the effort.
Abridgment of longer works was another tool—as when Samuel Richardson’s million-word Pamela was squeezed down to a mere 27,000 in an American edition. Other techniques for reducing how much we read have included condensation (think of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books) and anthologizing selections from longer works.
This tl;dr mind-set, encouraged by reading on-screen, is also shaping the kind of writing we increasingly see. Start with the nonacademic world.
In mid-2013, Nook Media introduced Nook Snaps: short fiction and narrative nonfiction works selling for under $2. By year’s end, Amazon had launched StoryFront, a new imprint of individual short stories. (And let’s not forget Kindle Singles.) Dozens of publishing initiatives are now creating stand-alone works that are intentionally compact. Among the players is SnackReads, which offers servings “perfect for your lunch break, your commute, or right before bed.”
Bringing more gravitas to the enterprise is the eponymous Tim Waterstone, founder of the bookstore chain in Britain. His new venture, Read Petite, will offer digital short stories, using a monthly subscription system akin to Netflix. The service is aimed at helping adult readers who have too little time and have “got out of the habit” of reading.
The recent explosion of “all you can read” e-book subscriptions such as Oyster, Scribd, and now Kindle Unlimited brings a plethora of inexpensive reads to our digital doorstep. Yet multiplying options doesn’t necessarily translate into more reading, even of best sellers. Only 28 percent of British readers who bought from the e-book seller Kobo made it to the end of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. (Yes, companies can—and do—track your every electronic page.)
The ultimate in keep-it-short platforms may well be the new online service Blinkist, which claims to boil down works of nonfiction to their bare bones:
Blinks are powerful bites of insight from outstanding nonfiction. You can read a blink in less than two minutes, so with each book made up of about eight blinks, you can cover the work’s key insights in 15 minutes.
SparkNotes, that faithful student standby, looks downright lengthy in comparison.
Yet for all their novelty, these new digital snaps and snacks and blinks are reminiscent of earlier solutions for time-strapped readers. Discounting the 18th-century language, the words of Vicesimus Knox, written in 1778, sound eerily modern:
But what shall [one] read during the interval of half an hour, interrupted perhaps by the prattle of children, or the impertinence of visitors, or the calls of business? Not a long and tedious treatise, divided and subdivided, and requiring at least the unsuspended attention of half a day, fully to comprehend the whole.
A parallel shortening trend has emerged in academic writing and publishing. In the humanities and social sciences, scholarly books continue to be the coin of the realm when it comes to promotion and tenure. However, the sales market for “scholarly length” monographs is shrinking. Not surprisingly, so is the size of what academic presses are looking to publish if they wish to stay financially afloat.
The trend began more than a decade ago, with academic publishers encouraging authors to keep it short. To quote Walter H. Lippincott, then director of Princeton University Press, “If a manuscript is over 100,000 words, you have to start to think whether you can afford to publish it.” Libraries (with their own budgets tightened, especially for print) can’t be counted on to buy enough copies to cover publication costs. If you price a book too high, the public readership—including academics—won’t buy it. And so at Princeton, “the editorial board takes length into account before agreeing to publish a book.” The implications for scholarship are clear: Size matters. Securing a contract on a 500-page book, however worthy the tome, has become a major challenge.
Recently academic presses have taken a more dramatic step: creating whole series of “short” or “brief " books, some of which are exclusively digital releases. We now have Princeton Shorts (“brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and produced exclusively in ebook format”), UNC Press Shorts (excerpted “compelling, shorter narratives from selected bestselling books published by the University of North Carolina Press” and presented “as engaging, quick reads”), Stanford Briefs (“short e-originals—about 20,000 to 40,000 words,” focusing on “a variety of academic topics”), and Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions (“concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects”).
What about scholarly periodicals? Each year, ever more academic journals are being published, resulting in increased demands on practitioners trying to keep up in their fields. How do they cope?
To help answer this question, return for a moment to that longitudinal study of changes in the journal-reading habits of scientists. Participants reported paying the same amount of attention to articles over the years, despite the decline in how much time they devoted to reading each piece. Were these readers doing more power browsing than in years past? Had they become faster readers? Had the scientific articles gotten shorter between 1977 and 2005?
At least in the field of psychology, “short” is a definite trend for journal articles. James Enns, as incoming editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, decided to feature brief reports as the first items in each issue, writing that “the culture demands shorter reports and rapid publication.” Psychologists at the University of California at Davis concluded that for the past 20 years, there has been a decided move in psychology publications to “shorter and faster,” causing concern about reducing research findings to what others have called “bite size” science.
Does it matter if academic scholarship is giving a nod to the short-is-beautiful mantra of text messaging and tweets? Definitely. Writing needs to find its natural length. The Gettysburg Address worked well at 272 words. Tom Stoppard’s 15-Minute Hamlet makes for a right-sized children’s production, but it is no substitute for the original in a Shakespeare class. When we give students ever-shorter reading assignments (in the hope they will be completed), we imply that substantial or complex texts aren’t worth the effort.
There’s another potentially troubling trend, again in scientific scholarship, this time directly linked to the move from hard copy to electronic-journal access. A sociologist at the University of Chicago surveyed the references cited in a database of 34 million scientific articles and analyzed the citations with respect to the online availability of the pieces referenced. The more journals became digitally available, the more recent the references became, and the narrower their scope. So much for the long view in scientific inquiry.
What do all these examples tell us about the impact of digital technology on the fate of reading in higher education? Smart moderns that we are, we devise solutions—increasingly technological ones—for going about our work. We power browse, we snippet read, we read on the prowl. We are encountering more individual texts but giving them shorter shrift.
In the process, we are redefining what it means to read. Digital screens privilege short, self-evident material that can be consumed when convenient. They are not tailor-made for sustained, reflective, analytical reading, much less rereading. Admittedly, I can’t imagine any of my colleagues feeling sanguine about reducing Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to eight two-minute blinks. But taken to its logical conclusion, that’s where on-screen reading is pointing us.
Reading has long been an anchor of learning in literate societies. Settling into a book affords us opportunities to contemplate, compare perspectives, wander the lives of others, and to wonder. If in our courses we condone replacing full-fledged texts with shorter versions, what message are we sending students about what there is to know or what it means to imagine? And if in our research we increasingly reduce the scope of our source materials, what assumptions are we ourselves making as professors about how much reading and attendant thinking are needed to create new knowledge?
Naomi S. Baron is a professor of linguistics and executive director of the Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning at American University. Her new book is Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press).