John Miedema

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Voluntary Slow Reading: Introduction
Slow reading is about reading at a reflective pace. The idea of reading more slowly may seem odd in a time of increasing demand for speed-reading of volumes of information. Certainly, it is often important to read quickly. Those who read slowly by nature admit to it only with a hanging head. Inquire a little further and the same reader will share a conviction that slow reading is an advantage, a pleasure when reading fiction and an aid to comprehension when deciphering a complex text.
Much …

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The modern glut of information has people reading all day long, from menus to credit card bills, but this kind of reading is shallow and of brief duration, alternating quickly between competing stimuli. Levy (2001) contrasted that style of reading with the more contemplative style of deep reading. That deep reading has sacred and reverential qualities is no surprise, for books have their roots in the codex, first adopted by early Christian communities as a vehicle for the Bible.
Early allusions to slow reading in the Bible come in …

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A familiar quote by the philosopher, Bacon, also used the metaphor of book-eating in reference to slow reading:
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention (2001).
The earliest explicit reference to the phrase “slow reading” appears to be in Nietzsche preface to Daybreak: “It is not for nothing that …

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… the literati are doing what her sex education nurse did in her seventh grade – forget to tell the students that the practice is quite fun. “Only the pleasure of reading do they castrate — just a bit — so it doesn’t get in the way; so that we remember that literature is not playing games, and, in general, that life is no picnic” (Oz, 1999, 14)
The modern reader lives in an age of plenty. Sutherland (2006) observed that every week more novels are published than Samuel …

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Teaching slow reading is still important. Without it, “democracy does not long prevail but succumbs to propaganda and demagoguery” (Hartman, 1996, 386)
Slow reading and democracy have been associated by a number of thinkers.
Postman (1985) lamented the decline of the Age of Typography, which had its zenith it the 19th century. Postman linked it with the Age of Reason. He noted the character of mind of the ordinary citizen of the day, who could listen for hours on end to political orations clearly shaped by a culture favouring text. …

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After a pressured day in his world of advertising there seemed to be no solution to the problems thrashing around in the head of Sydney Piddington. In The Special Joys of Super-Slow Reading, Piddington (1973) recounted his decision to relax by spending three hours on two chapters of a book, “I lost myself in the author’s world, living his book. And when I finally put it down, my mind was totally refreshed.” (157). Ironically, this article was published in Reader’s Digest. On the back flap was an advertisement …

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The Slow Movement brings a new attitude toward food and reading, a link that was made earlier with regard to bibliophagy. The Slow Food movement provides a new angle on the meaning of slow reading with regard to locality, i.e., one’s specific location on the planet. One of the themes of the Slow Food movement is the preservation of local food traditions and ecosystems; slow also means staying close to home. Similarly, reading can be slow not just in a temporal sense but also in a spatial sense …

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Studies of Voluntary Slow Reading
The previous posts in the series looked at more conceptual material on Voluntary Slow Reading (VSR). This post is the first of six that looks at studies on VSR.
Literary Reading
A number of concerning statistics have recently been reported on literary reading in the United States. While literary works can be read quickly, they generally offer more of reading challenge than, say, reading an MSN message. Even an advanced reader might be compelled to slow down because of the material itself, e.g., Milton’s Paradise Lost. …

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“Performance happens when students look closely at a piece of text and use their voices and bodies to explore the subtleties of the author’s words” (Lindblom, 2005, 116).
The heritage of VSR comes mainly from Religion, Philosophy and Literary Studies, and not without the occasional elitism of those disciplines, if only in perception. The influence of the Slow Movement has helped to shake off the stuffy airs of VSR. Another shake-up comes from teachers who have employed a diverse range of slow reading techniques with children in the classroom. …

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Two significant measures related to VSR are reading rate and comprehension. Reading rate provides an objective measure of slow reading, and measures of comprehension point to the quality of a reading. In Carver’s (1990) seminal work on rauding theory he proposed five “gears” of reading: scanning, skimming, rauding, learning and memorizing. Unlike scanning or skimming, the third gear, “rauding” includes comprehension; it is what we normally think of as reading. (He calls it rauding because he views reading and auding – listening to words – as the same …

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Taking a look at modern literacy, Krashen (2004) argued that few are completely unable to read and write. Rather, the modern crisis has to do with the steadily rising demands for literacy. “Although basic literacy has been on the increase for the last century, the demands for literacy have been rising faster” (x). People can read and write, just not well enough. The solution he recommends is free voluntary reading (FVR):
FVR means reading because you want to. No book report, no questions at the end of the chapter, …

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Nielsen (1997) performed a study entitled, “How User’s Read on the Web”. The first sentence in the report is, “They don’t” (pointed out by Bauerlein; see the discussion under Literary Reading). Seventy-nine percent of their test users always scanned the page, picking out words and sentences rather than reading word by word. Scanning is the antithesis of slow reading.
Reading on-line is different from reading print, and in general print seems better suited to slow reading. It is the very nature of hypertext to point the reader away from …

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Much of the material presented so far has been more descriptive than explanatory of slow reading. This is not surprising given the early stage of the research on the subject. However, a few studies were found that begin to provide psychological and neurophysiological reasons for why people read slowly.
Slow reading techniques have had some laboratory investigation. Hyönä & Nurminen (2006) found that adult readers are aware of both their reading speed, lookback and rereading behaviour. Looking back was positively correlated with recall of the text. That is, slow …

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Conclusion
Definition
Having reviewed and discussed the search results, a grounded definition of VSR can be stated. Some facets of VSR can also be asserted.
Voluntary slow reading (VSR) refers to freely chosen practices that reduce the rate of reading to increase the pleasure and comprehension of reading. Slow reading is a third way of reading, not just for information or entertainment. It involves a deep internalization of a text leading to changes in the reader. The rate of reading is variable; some readers will slow down only for selected passages. …