In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
Interpretation
Reading combines analytical and creative thinking.
Maryanne Wolf's quote highlights the dual nature of reading, where one engages both the scientific aspect of critical analysis and the poetic aspect of imagination and emotional expression. It suggests that through reading, we not only acquire knowledge and understanding like scientists, but we also explore feelings and creativity as poets.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one can use this quote to emphasize the value of reading.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.
What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well.
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
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