essay about the value of reading

Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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Value of reading essay 8 models

Value of reading essay with a lot of information on the importance of reading for the individual and society and how it opens the horizons in front of the minds to think and learn what they have not learned before. Reading is the food of the soul and the key to knowledge and culture. All of that you’ll find here in Value of reading essay.

Value of reading essay

Reading is the first source of knowledge of different cultures and civilizations and the benefit of the experience of previous nations. All of that you’ll find here in Value of reading essay.

Reading is the first and best source of knowledge, the strongest weapon any individual or society can ever have. Reading enables man to acquire the experience of others, which he can not acquire even if he has lived thousands of years .

Abbas Mahmoud al-Akkad said: “Reading adds to the age of man other ages”. Reading allows you to know the knowledge and experiences that have passed on humans since the beginning of writing and blogging and the experiences they gained from them.

The book is the only friend who can not betray you at all or lie to you, so there is no better friend to build your experience on his advice.

Conscious reading benefit the individual and society in general. If we wanted to see how the individual benefits from reading, We all agree on the knowledge gained by the reading of the individual and the various sciences that he learns through reading, which we do not know when will benefit us.

Even if we do not use this information directly from reading, it helps us connect and understand the universe better and wider.

We must also know that knowledge is the only thing that a person can not lose, It is possible for a person to be exposed to a situation in which he loses his job, his money or even his family and body, But knowledge is the only thing that can not leave a person.

If we were to give an example it will be the physicist Steve Hawking, we would admit that anyone exposed to what happened to him would lose hope in life and be at the bottom of society.

But what made Steve Hawking one of the greatest personalities in the whole world was his knowledge he first acquired by reading.

Value of reading

The value of reading varies from person to person. The scientific researcher can make reading more valuable and important and add new research and discoveries to it.

The student can make reading valuable by memorizing and understanding its content and reusing it in society. Also, the ordinary person can enlighten his mind and improve his morals and qualities.

Therefore, the value of reading may be different according to the person, but it is in any case very important, and helps and enlightens the mind and improves humanity, whether in the aspects of progress and learning, or from the educational aspect.

Therefore, reading cannot end or become extinct, like many things, because it is a cornerstone of our development and all nations know that and know the importance of reading.

Value of reading essay 200 words

The value of reading is great and invaluable. Reading can change an individual’s life and provide him with many opportunities in life, whether to succeed in his work by expanding his horizons and informing him of more details and information, or by acquiring new, modern and advanced skills and methods that someone else has access to.

It can be said that all ancient civilizations followed the method of writing in transmitting civilization and its history to future generations.

And by reading these civilizations, we were able to develop and progress in terms of those before us, while preserving the customs and traditions of our peoples, and preserving identity.

Reading continuously can improve the level of thought for the average person, help him to understand the picture more, and increase self-confidence with improvement in speaking and addressing, because it always activates the sentences and terms in your mind, which makes your mind always alert and active.

Also, reading has a great value in increasing the urbanization of peoples and reducing barbarism. As it is said in many proverbs, knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness.

Where science is described as a light that enlightens the mind, improves morals, and helps man to civilize and act rationally and with greater responsibility towards himself or towards members of his family and society.

Therefore, many believe that reading is invaluable and indispensable until people advance in their civilization and development, and until many peoples and civilizations adhere to their customs and traditions so as not to lose their identity.

The value of reading essay

Reading has a very great value because it nourishes the mind and soul, makes a person more rational and civilized, and makes him more aware, and less dangerous to society, on the contrary, it makes him more integrated and smooth and has a prior vision of many things.

In addition to the value of reading educational, scientific or historical articles, which make him familiar with many skills, tips or recipes.

Which makes it more advanced and has many scientific solutions that others have reached and was able to benefit from by reading the article or a book.

Therefore, continuous reading is considered food for the mind and soul, and a person is not satisfied with it, no matter how old he gets, he will continue to learn, benefit and develop until the last day of his life.

Therefore, I love reading a lot and I like to go back to some articles and research on many things that I have to express my opinion on or that to talk about them and I am ignorant of many aspects of them. This makes me very ready to speak with confidence and give many different models that show the extent of my experience of what I am talking about.

Essay on value of reading

A few years ago, I was suffering from a problem of lack of self-confidence, and I worry a lot when others talk about anything around me, and I find myself preferring to remain silent and not speak so as not to embarrass myself.

But I managed to overcome this problem by reading a lot. I found myself familiar with a lot of information, and I had a good background on many things. I have many sentences and expressions that I can use in conversation.

Reading may have a different value to them, but for me it was a good motivation to gain confidence in myself and integrate with others.

It also helped in increasing my awareness, and I became more familiar with the personalities of others and the extent of their influence on those around them, and how to deal with them.

Besides, I was able to excel in the study due to my access to a lot of historical or geographical information. This helped me a lot in absorbing many lessons, knowing the purpose of them, or knowing their events in advance.

I would very much like to continue reading, especially reading from paper books, not electronic ones. This is because I feel that paper books contain more information and focus, unlike reading from the phone, I am busy talking to friends or busy with many other things, I may be distracted and not pay attention to what I read.

Essay on the value of reading

Reading is one of the things that contributed to the progress of mankind, and made them more humane and advanced. This is because it contains self-discipline, development and education.

The more education is integrated into a society of progress and development and becomes more understanding and rational, and the mind becomes what governs their behavior and character.

The more education is lacking in a society, the mind becomes unused, and the action becomes from the body, which helps in increasing violence and dangerous actions.

Therefore, education and reading are very important at the beginning of the establishment of any society. After that, it plays many roles, including gaining self-confidence due to exposure to many and varied topics, increasing awareness, broad knowledge of many things, such as knowing yourself, or knowing others and how to deal with them, including cultural and entertainment books, and other books.

Whenever the person’s progress in education increased, his social and literary status increased with him. This requires him to study and continue reading, so that he is aware of all the things that surround him.

Value of reading short essay

Many people are ignorant of the value of reading, especially those who live in the 21st century. They do not realize how many nations have risen, advanced and become great, thanks to the foundation of their people on education, and their distance from ignorance.

Which led to the reduction of intolerance and violence, and their people became educated because of reading, and they are good at dealing and integrating into society, and they can progress and give to the state and society. All because of reading and education, which served as a beacon that helped him on the right path.

In the 21st century, we can see the impact of reading on people from their behavior, and their reactions in many situations.

Always the person who tends to read regularly, starts the conversation rationally and logically. We find a person who is uneducated or who cannot read, tends to physical behavior more than rationality and talking, in addition to his ignorance of many things that surround him, and he does not have the ability to speak fluently.

This is considered one of the benefits of reading, which is providing the person with many important and useful information that makes him very confident in himself, and he has many means that help him to talk or persuade.

Value of reading essay 150 words

Reading is a beacon for every person who wants to reach safety, as it provides a person with many of the things he needs from childhood to old age.

The deeper a person reads, the more he is able to benefit from it and progress and integrate into society more, and the conversation with him becomes more useful than others.

He now owns many theories and matters that have been recorded for his predecessors, which represent a good reference to begin with and lack nothing but applying on the ground at the present time, how much they can be developed according to the time or environment in which he lives.

We can also see the role of reading in different societies and how they were able to benefit from it, develop and transfer industrial and commercial experiences.

And how it was the reason for establishing projects, or learning one of the trades that became a main source of income for many people.

It also helps many groups to develop and learn many new experiences, such as doctors, and other people whose educational life does not end no matter how much they advance in life. It is an important reason for their progress and development.

In this way, we have presented to you the value of reading essay, and you can read more through the following link:

Importance of reading essay
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Essay on Benefits of Reading (1300 Words)

Reading helps our minds grow in ways that we can’t be taught in school or at home. No one is born with an innate love of reading, but everyone has the capacity for literacy, reading, and writing.

Essay on Benefits of Reading

1 – what is reading.

For most people, it’s hard to imagine life without reading. However, not everyone can read. Around 15% of the world’s population has some form of learning disability that prevents them from being able to read. This means that they cannot interpret words and sentences on paper or digital screens.

2 – Importance of reading

The first thing to know about reading is that it’s not something that you should force your students to do. Reading should be something you engage them in, not something you force them to do.

Let them enjoy reading for what it is — something enjoyable and entertaining at the same time. Engaging students will help them get more out of reading and will set the stage for future academic success.

It’s important to read. It’s not some new-fangled, modern idea that everyone is championing, but rather a human instinct that has been with us since the beginning of time. Books are more than just storytellers — they offer understanding and insight into different cultures, languages, ages, genders, classes, ideologies.

3 – The benefits of reading

Reading is the best way to learn new things, broaden your knowledge, and find inspiration. It also stimulates your brain.

Reading can help you keep your mind sharp and be in control of it. Reading in different genres helps you develop different skills in different ways.

Reading helps people to become better thinkers and is the key to unlocking people’s minds.

4 – How to develop reading habit

Binge on your favorite authors. Choose a genre that you’re interested in and read everything written by that author. Then find another author and binge on their books as well. Go back to the beginning of that author’s series and read all of the books in that series.

Read also: How to avoid distractions while reading?

5 – Tips for Better Reading

Here are some tips for better reading:-

6 – How to read more

Read also: Reading skills (types and strategies)

7 – Conclusion

Reading is something that everyone should do, so be sure to give it a try. There is no other form of education or experience that will give you more life knowledge than reading.

Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

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Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

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Benefits of Reading: Positive Impacts for All Ages Everyday

May 26, 2023

From apps to social media to Netflix to video games, there are so many ways to fill your free time that it can be hard to decide what to do. It’s also easy to overlook one of the most fulfilling and beneficial pastimes ever created. Let’s look at the main benefits of reading and how you can highlight them to your child.

What are the main benefits of reading books?

Benefits of reading before bed.

Benefits of reading to children

Benefits of reading out loud

Why is reading important.

Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits?

What are the benefits of reading fiction?

What are the benefits of reading poetry, it’s a gym for your brain.

The act of reading is a remarkable mental feat and reading comprehension uses a lot of your brain power. When you’re thumbing through a novel you’re building a whole world of people, places and events in your mind and remembering it all as you follow the story. This gives your imagination and memory a thorough workout and strengthens networks in various other parts of your brain too. 💪

If you’re reading a non-fiction book you’re also getting an in-depth experience of a subject full of facts and details that you need to hold in your mind to follow the arguments of the writer.

It’s well known that your memory improves with use as new memories are created and connected to older ones, making them stronger and easier to recall. Scientists have even found that the other parts of the brain activated by reading can continue to improve days after you’ve stopped reading, meaning even just a little bit of reading can go a long way.

It improves your focus

From Insta stories to tweets to TikTok videos, information is being packaged into ever smaller chunks and researchers believe our attention spans are getting shorter. However, being able to concentrate on one thing for long periods and ignore distractions is essential for school and for work. Reading is an excellent way to improve your concentration skills and the more you read, the better you’ll be able to focus. 🔍

It expands your vocabulary

Reading expands your vocabulary more than any other activity. A rich vocabulary allows you to understand the world in a more sophisticated way. Reading is also great for your grammar skills and lets you communicate your thoughts and ideas more accurately in all areas of your life.

It’s an education

Reading is the key to knowledge. Reading non-fiction books means you can learn about any subject you choose in as much detail as you want. Fiction allows you to learn about how other people all over the world live their lives and to put yourself in their shoes. This is a great way to improve your empathy and learn to approach other people with an open mind.

It helps your problem-solving skills

Reading fiction is also fantastic preparation to learn how to solve various types of problems you may not yet have encountered in your own life. You get the chance to follow the characters through all kinds of situations and find out how they deal with challenges big and small.

Maybe they make the right choices or maybe they don’t, either way, the writer has put a lot of thought and consideration into their story and you can always learn something from a character’s experiences. 🧩

It’s good therapy

Reading about difficult situations characters or real people experience can be hugely beneficial as well. It can be useful to read both fiction and non-fiction books about something you’re going through. Books can act as a type of therapy and help you to feel less alone in your situation.

This bibliotherapy has proven effective in helping people deal with issues such as depression or other mood disorders. The NHS even prescribes books to help people through its Reading Well programme!

Books offer the best value-for-money entertainment anywhere! There’s no expensive equipment to buy, no tickets to pay for and no monthly subscription fee. All you need is a library card for your local branch and you’re good to go!

Your nearest library probably has tens of thousands of different books available, so you’re sure to find a title to hook you. If they don’t have something in particular you're looking for, you can even ask the librarian to order it from another library.

Some libraries even offer ebooks on loan which you can add to your ereader or tablet 🏛️

It’ll inspire your child

If your children regularly see you reading you’ll be setting a good example. Children tend to copy what they see their parents do and they’ll soon be joining you storybook in hand for some quiet time you can enjoy together.

It’s great for stress

It’s not most people’s first idea of a relaxation technique, but reading does an awesome job of helping you manage stress. According to research, reading can lead to a lower heart rate and blood pressure and a calmer mind and just six minutes of reading can bring your stress levels down by more than 66%.

It helps you live longer!

If you still need another reason to commit yourself to read more, how about this: reading can actually help you live longer! Researchers discovered that those who read for half an hour a day had a 23% chance of living longer than people who didn’t read very much. In fact, readers lived around two years longer than non-readers! 🌳

So, if we’ve convinced you that you and your family need more reading in your lives, when is the best time to do it? Well, reading at bedtime allows you to kill two birds with one stone.

It helps you get a good night’s sleep

Despite its importance, many of us don’t follow good sleep hygiene and spend the hours before bedtime staring at screens big and small, leading to difficulty falling asleep and affecting the quality of our slumber. The NHS found that one in three of us experience poor sleep.

Choose to read an actual book before bedtime instead of checking your social media or watching Netflix and you can look forward to a better night’s rest. Reading fiction is a good way of relaxing the body and calming your mind and preparing for bed and has been shown to be as relaxing as meditation. 💤

It calms your child

If you treat your child to story time and read to them just before they go to bed you’ll discover that it’s perfect for calming them down and getting them in the right mood for sleep. As a bonus, they’ll get used to sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a long time.

Benefits of reading to children

Children can eventually enjoy all the benefits of reading mentioned above but whether they are too small to read much themselves or they just enjoy listening to you tell them a story, they can get some extra value out of the experience if you read to them regularly yourself.

It gives them a love of learning

If you start by reading to your child you can get them hooked on books and start a habit that will last them throughout their lives and repay your investment over and over again. Children who learn to read for pleasure will go on to enjoy greater academic success throughout their education according to research. 👩🏽‍🎓

It gives them a head-start

Even if your little one is a toddler who isn’t ready to start reading storybooks by themselves, you can give their literacy skills an early boost and teach them to read by reading to them yourself. They might not understand everything but they’ll pick up enough to get the idea. Let them see the words on the page as you read and encourage them to turn the page when you get to the last word.

By reading to them you’ll be helping them follow the natural rhythms of language, practise their listening skills and expose them to vocabulary they might not get to hear in their day-to-day lives.

It brings you together

Time spent reading to your child is a wonderful chance to create some beautiful, cosy, loving memories together and strengthen your bond. It will become something like a regular adventure you and your child can look forward to doing together and will remember all your lives. 👩‍👦

It also gives you lots to talk about later and you can have enjoyable discussions about the characters, plots, dilemmas and mysteries you discover during your reading time.

Even when your child starts to read for themselves, you don’t need to stop your shared storytime. You can swap it up, with them taking on the role of the reader as you listen or you can take turns reading to each other.

You’ve probably been taught that the best method of reading is in silence. However, research has found that quiet reading isn’t actually always the better option and that there are in fact some benefits of reading out loud. 📢

It helps you understand

It turns out that speaking as you read can help you understand texts better. You probably read aloud more than you realise. If you’ve ever received a slightly convoluted message or email or you’ve tried to read confusing legal jargon, you’ve probably found yourself repeating the words out loud to more clearly understand what was meant. ✅

It helps you remember

Or perhaps you’ve tried to memorise a phone number or the lines of a speech and you automatically started to say the information aloud to help you remember.

Psychologists call this the “production effect” and have discovered that these tactics do actually help people remember things more easily, especially children. 📚

Research from Australia showed that children who were told to read out loud recognized 17% more words compared to children who were asked to read silently. In another study, adults were able to identify 20% more words they had read aloud.

The theory is that because reading aloud is an active process it makes words more distinctive, and so easier to remember. 🧠

Why read?

Reading is the most effective way to get information about almost everything and is the key ingredient in learning for school, work and pleasure. On top of this, reading boosts imagination, communication, memory, concentration, and empathy. It also lowers stress levels and leads to a longer life.

Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits as reading books?

It can be hard to concentrate for a long time and the experience of reading. With a real book you can quickly scan your eyes back over the page to reread what you’ve missed, this isn’t so easy with an audiobook. A psychology study showed that students who read material did 28% better on a test than those who heard the same material as a podcast.

Reading fiction is a useful way to develop your empathy, social skills and emotional intelligence. Fictional stories allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and see things from various perspectives. In fact, brain scans show that many of the parts of the brain you use to interact with other people are also activated when you’re reading fiction.

Poetry is the home of the most creative, imaginative and beautiful examples of language and allows you to connect those powerful lines to real emotions all of us feel. Poetry is also efficient and a good poet can reveal deep ideas with a simple phrase. Reading poetry can also inspire your creativity and write some expressive verse of your own!

Reading is something most of us have been doing all our lives and as a result, we can easily take it for granted, but it’s a great all-around experience for your mind and spirit. So, it's really worth digging out your library card and finding books you and your child can read together.

If your child is having problems with reading, here at GoStudent we have education experts on standby to give you and them a helping hand in improving their literacy skills or any other learning challenges they need support with. Schedule a free trial lesson with GoStudent today!

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📖Essay on Importance of Reading: Samples in 100, 150, and 250 Words

Updated on
Apr 26, 2024

Language learning requires four skills i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. It is an important part that eventually builds up the communication skills of a person. Reading will help in attaining knowledge of variable fields. It enhances the intellect of a person. Reading helps students to enhance their language fluency. Students must adopt the habit of reading good books. Reading books can also improve the writing skills. If you are a school student and searching for a good sample essay on the importance of reading then, you landed at the right place. Here in this blog, we have covered some sample essays on the importance of reading!

Table of Contents

1 Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words
2 Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words
3 Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words
4 Short Essay on Importance of Reading

Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words

The English language is considered the global language because it is the most widely spoken language worldwide. Reading is one of the important parts of acquiring complete knowledge of any language. Reading helps in maintaining a good vocabulary that is helpful for every field, whether in school, interviews , competitive exams , or jobs.

Students must inculcate the habit of reading from a young age. Making a habit of reading good books will eventually convert into an addiction over time and you will surely explore a whole new world of information.

Being exposed to different topics through reading can help you look at the wider perspective of life. You will eventually discover a creative side of yours while developing the habit of reading.

Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words

Reading is considered an important aspect that contributes to the development of the overall personality of any person. If a person wants to do good at a professional level then he/she must practice reading.

There are various advantages of reading. It is not only a source of entertainment but also opens up the creative ability of any person. Reading helps in self-improvement, enhances communication skills, and reduces stress. It is one of the sources of pleasure and also enhances the analytical skills.

Here are some of the best books to study that may help you enhance your reading skills:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling .
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee .
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri .
Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby

A person with good reading skills would be able to communicate with more confidence and shine brighter at the professional level. Reading is a mental exercise, as it can provide you with the best experience because while reading fiction, or non-fiction you use your imagination without any restrictions thereby exploring a whole new world on your own. So, Just Enjoy Reading!

Also Read: Communication Skills to Succeed at Work

Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words

Reading is a language skill necessary to present yourself in front of others because without being a good reader, it’s difficult to be a good communicator. Reading books should be practised regularly. Books are considered a human’s best friend.

It is right to say that knowledge can’t be stolen. Reading enhances the knowledge of a person. There are numerous benefits of reading.

I love reading books and one of my all-time favorite authors is William Shakespeare. His work “As You Like It” is my favourite book. By reading that book I came across many new words. It enabled me to add many words to my vocabulary that I can use in my life.

Apart from this, there are many other benefits of reading books such as reading can help you write in a certain way that can impress the reader. It also enhances communication skills and serves as a source of entertainment .

Schools conduct various competitions which directly or indirectly involve reading. Some such competitions include debate, essay writing competitions, elocution, new reading in assembly, etc. All such activities require active reading because without reading a person might not be able to speak on a specific topic.

All such activities are conducted to polish the language skills of students from the very beginning so that they can do good at a professional level.

In conclusion, in a world of technological advancement, you are more likely to get easy access to online reading material available on the internet. So, you must not miss this opportunity and devote some time to reading different kinds of books.

Short Essay on Importance of Reading

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Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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The Value of Reading: An Essay in English for Students

Ishara upamali, value of reading essay in english for students 150 words.

This is the age of technology. But we all know the value of reading. There is a wide variety of reading material which is freely available to most of the people in the world. We can read books, magazines, newspapers, journals and so on.

In this age of technology, the computer has also become a very popular sores of reading.

Many people thought that books might become ' old fashioned '. Anyway, this is fortunately not true. In our country the annual Book Fair shows that books are still very popular among the children and adults.

We read for two main reasons. One is to find information and gather knowledge. The other is for fun and entertainment. For information and knowledge, we read non - fictional books. They are available on any subject we need. The choice and variety in each subject are so wide that selecting what we need is a problem. Good libraries in schools or public libraries can help us find what we need.

Value of reading essay in English for students 250 words

Now a days, books on fiction, that is; novels and story books are also freely available. Usually, friends get together and select books according to what they enjoy.

Reading is a very healthy habit, and is an interesting hobby not only to read books in your own language but also those written in another language. This will help improve your knowledge while enjoying yourself at the same time. Using the computer as a source of reading is popular. However, it is important to select carefully as there is no one to guide you.

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Reading empowers: the importance of reading for students

Peter Lucantoni

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Research shows that students who are reading for pleasure and are reading widely, are more likely to achieve academic success at school and in examinations.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader Margaret Fuller, 19th century American journalist

Teaching students why reading empowers

The problem nowadays of course is that there seems to be less of a desire to read than in the past. Teachers often complain that ‘our students don’t read!’ and that ‘reading is not part of our culture’. What’s more, most teachers believe that trying to encourage students to read is an enormous, and often time-wasting, challenge. We know that reading is a source of knowledge and language, but it should also be a source of entertainment, and I think that here lies part of the answer to the problem of our students not reading.

We need to ask ourselves when we last gave our students the chance to read something just for the pleasure of reading it, just for the pure enjoyment of reading it. The fact that reading is so often linked to eight comprehension questions, a test, or another form of ‘checking that my students have understood’, it isn’t really so surprising that there is little enjoyment for students. Therefore, we need to show our students the benefits of reading for fun, by allowing them to have the time to do so during the day.

Witnessing students reading for fun

On a recent visit to the UK I was genuinely surprised by two things I saw. The first was in a bookshop. I went inside because it had started to rain and it seemed a good opportunity to have a coffee and browse some books in the dry. I searched around for somewhere to sit but all the comfortable, easy chairs were occupied – by teenagers with their heads buried in books.

The second surprise was a little later the same day as I sat on the top deck of a double-decker bus. The front three rows were occupied by youngsters, again with their heads buried in books, and all of them oblivious to anything and everyone else around them. In both cases, the readers were not reading school textbooks, but stories written for their specific age group. It was obvious to me that those young people were highly motivated by what they were reading, most likely because they themselves had chosen to read the text because it was of interest to them.

How to get students reading for pleasure

The dilemma we face is how to get our students to behave in this way in the classroom. First and foremost, we need to remove their fear of always being formally questioned during or after reading. Secondly, students have to be given opportunities to read simply for the pleasure of reading, and part of this approach is to give students a choice in what they read.

Teachers may argue that there isn’t enough time to allow this to happen, but I believe that even five minutes of reading for pleasure every day or every lesson will soon increase students’ motivation to want to read through their own choice. Of course, in reality, students cannot choose what to read in a coursebook unit, and it may often be the case that due to lack of resources or funds a school may not be able to supply students with choices in terms of what they read. But a start has to be made somewhere.

Remember, reading empowers! If parents are not encouraging their children to read independently, then this encouragement has to take place in the classroom.

Oscar Wilde said: “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

The importance of reading for students is no secret. Try and implement these strategies in the classroom and you could find some amazing results. For more information, view our English resources online.

Peter Lucantoni has had a long career in English language teaching and teacher training in Europe, the Middle East, and, since 1993, in Cyprus. He is the author and co-author of several popular coursebooks for students, including Cambridge IGCSE English as a Second Language .

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Can Reading Make You Happier?

By Ceridwen Dovey

An abstract illustration of a young woman reading a book with flowers all around her.

Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.

But the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love, I wrote. I’m not religious, and I don’t particularly want to be, but I’d like to read more about other people’s reflections on coming to some sort of early, weird form of faith in a “higher being” as an emotional survival tactic. Simply answering the questions made me feel better, lighter.

We had some satisfying back-and-forths over e-mail, with Berthoud digging deeper, asking about my family’s history and my fear of grief, and when she sent the final reading prescription it was filled with gems, none of which I’d previously read. Among the recommendations was “The Guide,” by R. K. Narayan. Berthoud wrote that it was “a lovely story about a man who starts his working life as a tourist guide at a train station in Malgudi, India, but then goes through many other occupations before finding his unexpected destiny as a spiritual guide.” She had picked it because she hoped it might leave me feeling “strangely enlightened.” Another was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago: “Saramago doesn’t reveal his own spiritual stance here but portrays a vivid and compelling version of the story we know so well.” “Henderson the Rain King,” by Saul Bellow, and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse, were among other prescribed works of fiction, and she included some nonfiction, too, such as “The Case for God,” by Karen Armstrong, and “Sum,” by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, a “short and wonderful book about possible afterlives.”

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I worked my way through the books on the list over the next couple of years, at my own pace—interspersed with my own “discoveries”—and while I am fortunate enough to have my ability to withstand terrible grief untested, thus far, some of the insights I gleaned from these books helped me through something entirely different, when, over several months, I endured acute physical pain. The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly , “A Literary Clinic.” In it, the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,” Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow.”

Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books. Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction. The two met at Cambridge University as undergraduates, more than twenty years ago, and bonded immediately over the shared contents of their bookshelves, in particular Italo Calvino’s novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,” which is itself about the nature of reading. As their friendship developed, they began prescribing novels to cure each other’s ailments, such as a broken heart or career uncertainty. “When Suse was having a crisis about her profession—she wanted to be a writer, but was wondering if she could cope with the inevitable rejection—I gave her Don Marquis’s ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ poems,” Berthoud told me. “If Archy the cockroach could be so dedicated to his art as to jump on the typewriter keys in order to write his free-verse poems every night in the New York offices of the Evening Sun, then surely she should be prepared to suffer for her art, too.” Years later, Elderkin gave Berthoud,who wanted to figure out how to balance being a painter and a mother, Patrick Gale’s novel “Notes from an Exhibition,” about a successful but troubled female artist.

They kept recommending novels to each other, and to friends and family, for many years, and, in 2007, when the philosopher Alain de Botton, a fellow Cambridge classmate, was thinking about starting the School of Life, they pitched to him the idea of running a bibliotherapy clinic. “As far as we knew, nobody was doing it in that form at the time,” Berthoud said. “Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a transformational experience.”

Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. “Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,” Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy.

There is now a network of bibliotherapists selected and trained by Berthoud and Elderkin, and affiliated with the School of Life, working around the world, from New York to Melbourne. The most common ailments people tend to bring to them are the life-juncture transitions, Berthoud says: being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your relationship, or suffering bereavement. The bibliotherapists see a lot of retirees, too, who know that they have twenty years of reading ahead of them but perhaps have only previously read crime thrillers, and want to find something new to sustain them. Many seek help adjusting to becoming a parent. “I had a client in New York, a man who was having his first child, and was worried about being responsible for another tiny being,” Berthoud says. “I recommended ‘Room Temperature,’ by Nicholson Baker, which is about a man feeding his baby a bottle and having these meditative thoughts about being a father. And of course 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' because Atticus Finch is the ideal father in literature.”

Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016.

For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology , based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.

Other studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.

Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood,” he wrote in his 2011 book, “Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction.” “Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world…based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures.” This idea echoes a long-held belief among both writers and readers that books are the best kinds of friends; they give us a chance to rehearse for interactions with others in the world, without doing any lasting damage. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”

George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” But not everybody agrees with this characterization of fiction reading as having the ability to make us behave better in real life. In her 2007 book, “Empathy and the Novel,” Suzanne Keen takes issue with this “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” and is skeptical about whether empathetic connections made while reading fiction really translate into altruistic, prosocial behavior in the world. She also points out how hard it is to really prove such a hypothesis. “Books can’t make change by themselves—and not everyone feels certain that they ought to,” Keen writes. “As any bookworm knows, readers can also seem antisocial and indolent. Novel reading is not a team sport.” Instead, she urges, we should enjoy what fiction does give us, which is a release from the moral obligation to feel something for invented characters—as you would for a real, live human being in pain or suffering—which paradoxically means readers sometimes “respond with greater empathy to an unreal situation and characters because of the protective fictionality.” And she wholeheartedly supports the personal health benefits of an immersive experience like reading, which “allows a refreshing escape from ordinary, everyday pressures.”

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

One of Berthoud’s clients described to me how the group and individual sessions she has had with Berthoud have helped her cope with the fallout from a series of calamities, including losing her husband, the end of a five-year engagement, and a heart attack. “I felt my life was without purpose,” she says. “I felt a failure as a woman.” Among the books Berthoud initially prescribed was John Irving’s novel “The Hotel New Hampshire.” “He was a favorite writer of my husband, [whom] I had felt unable to attempt for sentimental reasons.” She was “astounded and very moved” to see it on the list, and though she had avoided reading her husband’s books up until then, she found reading it to be “a very rewarding emotional experience, both in the literature itself and ridding myself of demons.” She also greatly appreciated Berthoud guiding her to Tom Robbins’s novel “Jitterbug Perfume,” which was “a real learning curve for me about prejudice and experimentation.”

One of the ailments listed in “The Novel Cure” is “overwhelmed by the number of books in the world,” and it’s one I suffer from frequently. Elderkin says this is one of the most common woes of modern readers, and that it remains a major motivation for her and Berthoud’s work as bibliotherapists. “We feel that though more books are being published than ever before, people are in fact selecting from a smaller and smaller pool. Look at the reading lists of most book clubs, and you’ll see all the same books, the ones that have been shouted about in the press. If you actually calculate how many books you read in a year—and how many that means you’re likely to read before you die—you’ll start to realize that you need to be highly selective in order to make the most of your reading time.” And the best way to do that? See a bibliotherapist, as soon as you can, and take them up on their invitation, to borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”: "Come, and take choice of all my library/And so beguile thy sorrow…"

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By Rebecca Mead

By The New Yorker

Drake, Kendrick Lamar, and Our Moment of Bad Reading

By Lauren Michele Jackson

Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?

By Anthony Lane

How Reading Makes Us More Human

A debate has erupted over whether reading fiction makes human beings more moral. But what if its real value consists in something even more fundamental?

A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay , "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response , Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter and nicer," among other things. Yet these essays aren't so much coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.

To advance her thesis, Paul cites studies by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Taken together, their findings suggest that those "who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective." It's the kind of thing writer Joyce Carol Oates is talking about when she says, "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

Oatley and Mar's conclusions are supported, Paul argues, by recent studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. This research shows that "deep reading -- slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity -- is a distinctive experience," a kind of reading that differs in kind and quality from "the mere decoding of words" that constitutes a good deal of what passes for reading today, particularly for too many of our students in too many of our schools (as I have previously written about here ).

Paul concludes her essay with a reference to the literary critic Frank Kermode, who famously distinguishes between "carnal reading" -- characterized by the hurried, utilitarian information processing that constitutes the bulk of our daily reading diet -- and "spiritual reading," reading done with focused attention for pleasure, reflection, analysis, and growth. It is in this distinction that we find the real difference between the warring factions in what might be a chicken-or-egg scenario: Does great literature make people better, or are good people drawn to reading great literature?

Currie is asking whether reading great literature makes readers more moral -- a topic taken up by Aristotle in Poetics (which makes an ethical apology for literature) . Currie cites as counter-evidence the well-read, highly cultured Nazis. The problem with this (aside from falling into the trap of Godwin's Law ) is that the Nazis were, in fact, acting in strict conformity to the dictates of a moral code, albeit the perverse code of the Third Reich. But Paul examines the connection of great literature not to our moral selves, but to our spiritual selves.

What good literature can do and does do -- far greater than any importation of morality -- is touch the human soul.

Reading is one of the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. As many scholars have noted, and Paul too mentions in her piece, reading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual -- however one understands that word -- about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to "read" means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of "interpreting" in the sense of "reading" a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities.

It is "spiritual reading" -- not merely decoding -- that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others. This is why the way we read can be even more important than what we read. In fact, reading good literature won't make a reader a better person any more than sitting in a church, synagogue or mosque will. But reading good books well just might.

It did for me. As I relayed in my literary and spiritual memoir , the books I have read over a lifetime have shaped my worldview, my beliefs, and my life as much as anything else. From Great Expectations I learned the power the stories we tell ourselves have to do either harm and good, to ourselves and to others; from Death of a Salesman I learned the dangers of a corrupt version of the American Dream; from Madame Bovary, I learned to embrace the real world rather than escaping into flights of fancy; from Gulliver's Travels I learned the profound limitations of my own finite perspective; and from Jane Eyre I learned how to be myself. These weren't mere intellectual or moral lessons, although they certainly may have begun as such. Rather, the stories from these books and so many others became part of my life story and then, gradually, part of my very soul.

As Eugene H. Peterson explains in Eat this Book , "Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated, taken into the soul -- eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight." Peterson describes this ancient art of lectio divina, or spiritual reading, as "reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes ... love and wisdom." More than the books themselves, it is the skills and the desire to read in this way which comprise the essential gift we must give our students and ourselves. But this won't happen by way of nature or by accident.

Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain , has studied "deep reading" in the context of the science of the brain. She describes the fragility of the brain's ability to read with the kind of sustained attention that allows literature to wield its shaping power over us:

The act of going beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert reader. ... Because we literally and physiologically can read in multiple ways, how we read--and what we absorb from our reading -- will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium we use.

The power of "spiritual reading" is its ability to transcend the immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at hand. This isn't the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to the quantifiable data Currie seeks, although Paul demonstrates is possible, to measure. Even so, such reading doesn't make us better so much as it makes us human .

Essay on Importance of Reading

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In an era dominated by digital media, the timeless tradition of reading stands as a testament to the enduring power of written words to enlighten minds, stir emotions, and expand horizons. Reading is not merely an act of decoding letters on a page; it is a journey into the depths of the human experience, offering a window into different cultures, histories, and perspectives. This essay explores the multifaceted importance of reading, highlighting its role in personal development, education, empathy cultivation, and societal progress.

The Foundation of Knowledge and Critical Thinking

Reading is the cornerstone of education and knowledge acquisition. It introduces readers to a vast array of subjects, from the intricate workings of the universe to the complexities of human behavior. Through reading, individuals gain access to the collective wisdom of humanity, distilled through the ages in books, articles, and texts. This exposure to diverse ideas and viewpoints is crucial for the development of critical thinking skills. It encourages readers to question assumptions, draw connections between disparate concepts, and formulate their own informed opinions.

Enhancing Cognitive Abilities

Engaging with written material challenges the brain, requiring concentration, comprehension, and analysis. This cognitive engagement helps to sharpen the mind, improve memory, and boost analytical skills. Studies have shown that regular reading can slow the cognitive decline associated with aging, underscoring its role in maintaining mental acuity throughout life.

The Portal to Other Worlds and Perspectives

Reading is a unique form of travel, offering an escape from the confines of one’s immediate environment to explore distant lands, alternate realities, and the inner landscapes of diverse characters. This journey fosters a deep sense of empathy and understanding, as readers are invited to view the world through the eyes of others. By experiencing the joys, sorrows, struggles, and triumphs of characters from different backgrounds and cultures, readers develop a more nuanced appreciation of the diversity of the human condition.

Cultivating Empathy and Understanding

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a critical skill in today’s increasingly interconnected world. Reading, particularly fiction, has been shown to enhance readers’ empathy by immersing them in the emotional lives of characters. This empathetic engagement with diverse narratives helps to break down barriers of prejudice and intolerance, promoting a more inclusive and compassionate society.

Benifits of Reading

Mental Stimulation: Reading engages the brain, stimulating cognitive functions like concentration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It keeps the mind active and sharpens intellectual abilities.
Knowledge Acquisition: Reading exposes readers to a wide range of topics, ideas, and information. It’s a primary means of learning about the world, history, cultures, and various fields of study.
Vocabulary Expansion: Regular reading introduces readers to new words and phrases, improving vocabulary and language skills. A rich vocabulary enhances communication and writing abilities.
Improved Focus and Concentration: Reading requires sustained attention, helping to enhance focus and concentration levels. It can be especially beneficial for developing these skills in children.
Stress Reduction: Engaging in a good book can be a form of relaxation, reducing stress and promoting mental well-being. It provides an escape from daily worries and offers a sense of calm.
Enhanced Empathy: Reading fiction, in particular, allows readers to immerse themselves in the lives and experiences of fictional characters. This can lead to greater empathy and a better understanding of diverse perspectives.
Cultural Awareness: Books provide insights into different cultures, traditions, and historical contexts, fostering cultural awareness and tolerance.
Better Sleep: Establishing a reading routine before bedtime can signal the body that it’s time to relax and wind down, potentially improving sleep quality.
Creativity Boost: Reading encourages imagination and creativity by exposing readers to new ideas, scenarios, and possibilities. It can inspire creative thinking and problem-solving.
Entertainment and Escape: Reading can be highly entertaining, offering an escape into captivating stories, adventures, and fictional worlds. It’s a form of entertainment that requires only a book and one’s imagination.
Emotional Intelligence: Literature often explores complex emotions and human relationships, helping readers develop emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills.
Lifelong Learning: Reading fosters a lifelong love of learning. It encourages individuals to seek out new information, explore diverse subjects, and stay intellectually curious throughout their lives.
Improved Writing Skills: Exposure to well-written books can improve one’s own writing skills, teaching effective communication and storytelling techniques.
Career Advancement: Reading can be directly beneficial to one’s career by expanding knowledge in one’s field or by providing insights into leadership, management, and personal development.
Social Connection: Sharing book recommendations and discussing literature can foster social connections and build communities of readers.

A Lifelong Source of Pleasure and Relaxation

Beyond its cognitive and empathetic benefits, reading offers immense pleasure and relaxation. It provides a respite from the stresses of daily life, allowing readers to lose themselves in stories that inspire, entertain, and provoke thought. Whether it’s the thrill of a mystery, the allure of a romance, or the intrigue of a historical saga, reading offers a rich tapestry of experiences that enrich the soul and spark the imagination.

Encouraging Lifelong Learning

The habit of reading fosters a love of learning that can last a lifetime. It keeps the mind engaged and curious, constantly seeking new knowledge and insights. This love of learning is invaluable in a world where change is the only constant. It prepares individuals to adapt to new challenges, pursue continuous personal and professional development, and contribute meaningfully to their communities and the world at large.

The Role of Reading in Societal Progress

Reading plays a pivotal role in driving societal progress. It empowers individuals with the knowledge and skills needed to address complex challenges, advocate for justice and equity, and envision and work towards a better future. Literate societies are better equipped to participate in democratic processes, engage in critical public discourse, and foster innovation and creativity.

Bridging Divides and Fostering Global Understanding

In a globalized world, reading is a powerful tool for bridging cultural and ideological divides. It exposes readers to the rich tapestry of human cultures, promoting understanding and respect across differences. By cultivating a global perspective, reading contributes to a more harmonious and interconnected world.

In conclusion, The importance of reading cannot be overstated. It is a fundamental skill that lies at the heart of personal and intellectual growth, empathy development, and societal progress. In a world fraught with challenges and divisions, reading offers hope, providing the tools for critical thinking, the empathy to understand diverse perspectives, and the vision to imagine and create a better future.

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Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas

As a writer, you love to read and talk to others about reading books. Check out some examples of essays about reading and topic ideas for your essay.

Many people fall in love with good books at an early age, as experiencing the joy of reading can help transport a child’s imagination to new places. Reading isn’t just for fun, of course—the importance of reading has been shown time and again in educational research studies.

If you love to sit down with a good book, you likely want to share your love of reading with others. Reading can offer a new perspective and transport readers to different worlds, whether you’re into autobiographies, books about positive thinking, or stories that share life lessons.

When explaining your love of reading to others, it’s important to let your passion shine through in your writing. Try not to take a negative view of people who don’t enjoy reading, as reading and writing skills are tougher for some people than others.

Talk about the positive effects of reading and how it’s positively benefitted your life. Offer helpful tips on how people can learn to enjoy reading, even if it’s something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. Remember, your goal when writing essays about reading is to make others interested in exploring the world of books as a source of knowledge and entertainment.

Now, let’s explore some popular essays on reading to help get you inspired and some topics that you can use as a starting point for your essay about how books have positively impacted your life.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers

Examples Of Essays About Reading

1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times
2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan
3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

4. How ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ Saved Me By Isaac Fitzgerald

5. catcher in the rye: that time a banned book changed my life by pat kelly, topic ideas for essays about reading, 1. how can a high school student improve their reading skills, 2. what’s the best piece of literature ever written, 3. how reading books from authors of varied backgrounds can provide a different perspective, 4. challenging your point of view: how reading essays you disagree with can provide a new perspective.

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1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times

“My error the first time around was to read “Middlemarch” as one would a typical novel. But “Middlemarch” isn’t really about plot and dialogue. It’s all about character, as mediated through the wise and compassionate (but sharply astute) voice of the omniscient narrator. The book shows us that we cannot live without other people and that we cannot live with other people unless we recognize their flaws and foibles in ourselves.” The New York Times

In this collection of reader essays, people share the books that have shaped how they see the world and live their lives. Talking about a life-changing piece of literature can offer a new perspective to people who tend to shy away from reading and can encourage others to pick up your favorite book.

2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan

“Consistent reading helps you develop your analytical thinking skills over time. It stimulates your brain and allows you to think in new ways. When you are actively engaged in what you’re reading, you would be able to ask better questions, look at things from a different perspective, identify patterns and make connections.” Anangsha Alammyan

Alammyan shares how she got away from habits that weren’t serving her life (such as scrolling on social media) and instead turned her attention to focus on reading. She shares how she changed her schedule and time management processes to allow herself to devote more time to reading, and she also shares the many ways that she benefited from spending more time on her Kindle and less time on her phone.

3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

“When my learning specialist convinced me that I was an intelligent person with a reading disorder, I gradually stopped hiding from what I was most afraid of—the belief that I was a person of mediocre intelligence with overambitious goals for herself. As I slowly let go of this fear, I became much more aware of my learning issues. For the first time, I felt that I could dig below the surface of my unhappiness in school without being ashamed of what I might find.” Blair Kenney

Reading does not come easily to everyone, and dyslexia can make it especially difficult for a person to process words. In this essay, Kenney shares her experience of being diagnosed with dyslexia during her sophomore year of college at Yale. She gave herself more patience, grew in her confidence, and developed techniques that worked to improve her reading and processing skills.

“I took that book home to finish reading it. I’d sit somewhat uncomfortably in a tree or against a stone wall or, more often than not, in my sparsely decorated bedroom with the door closed as my mother had hushed arguments with my father on the phone. There were many things in the book that went over my head during my first time reading it. But a land left with neither Rhyme nor Reason, as I listened to my parents fight, that I understood.” Isaac Fitzgerald

Books can transport a reader to another world. In this essay, Fitzgerald explains how Norton Juster’s novel allowed him to escape a difficult time in his childhood through the magic of his imagination. Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts.

“From the first paragraph my mind was blown wide open. It not only changed my whole perspective on what literature could be, it changed the way I looked at myself in relation to the world. This was heavy stuff. Of the countless books I had read up to this point, even the ones written in first person, none of them felt like they were speaking directly to me. Not really anyway.” Pat Kelly

Many readers have had the experience of feeling like a book was written specifically for them, and in this essay, Kelly shares that experience with J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel. Writing about a book that felt like it was written specifically for you can give you the chance to share what was happening in your life when you read the book and the lasting impact that the book had on you as a person.

There are several topic options to choose from when you’re writing about reading. You may want to write about how literature you love has changed your life or how others can develop their reading skills to derive similar pleasure from reading.

Middle and high school students who struggle with reading can feel discouraged when, despite their best efforts, their skills do not improve. Research the latest educational techniques for boosting reading skills in high school students (the research often changes) and offer concrete tips (such as using active reading skills) to help students grow.

It’s an excellent persuasive essay topic; it’s fun to write about the piece of literature you believe to be the greatest of all time. Of course, much of this topic is a matter of opinion, and it’s impossible to prove that one piece of literature is “better” than another. Write your essay about how the piece of literature you consider the best positive affected your life and discuss how it’s impacted the world of literature in general.

The world is full of many perspectives and points of view, and it can be hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Reading books by authors of different gender, race, or socioeconomic status can help open your eyes to the challenges and issues others face. Explain how reading books by authors with different backgrounds has changed your worldview in your essay.

It’s fun to read the information that reinforces viewpoints that you already have, but doing so doesn’t contribute to expanding your mind and helping you see the world from a different perspective. Explain how pushing oneself to see a different point of view can help you better understand your perspective and help open your eyes to ideas you may not have considered.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

Amanda has an M.S.Ed degree from the University of Pennsylvania in School and Mental Health Counseling and is a National Academy of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer. She has experience writing magazine articles, newspaper articles, SEO-friendly web copy, and blog posts.

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Sunday-June-9-2024

Why Read? The importance of instilling a love of reading early.

Woman sitting on the floor reading to a group of small children gathered closely around. her

Definitionally, literacy is the ability to “read, write, spell, listen, and speak.”

Carol Anne St. George, EdD, an associate professor and literacy expert at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, wants kids to fall in love with reading .

“It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world,” she says. “The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination, and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.”

Reading is necessary for learning, so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining, and exciting formative experiences for children to remember. Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives.

Instilling a love of reading early gives a child a head start on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination.

“Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms, and other genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own and helps us to improve,” says author and writing teacher, Roz Morris. “Reading—the good and the bad—inspires you.”

Not only that, but reading is a critical foundation for developing logic and problem-solving skills. Cognitive development is “the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood” (HealthofChildren.com).

Why Focus on Summer?

Summer vacation makes up about one-quarter of the calendar year. This is a time when students face different opportunities based on the social and economic status of their families. An analysis of summer learning (Cooper, Nye, et al., 1996) found that “all students lost mathematics and reading knowledge over the summer…This evidence also indicated that losses were larger for low-income students, particularly in reading.” Summer reading has emerged as a key component of state legislation aimed at promoting student literacy.

The Horizons at Warner program is committed to maintaining and improving student literacy with our kids every summer they return. Nationwide, each affiliate of Horizons National administers reading assessments to students during the first and last weeks of program. Pre-assessment allows our teachers to customize the learning experience on a student-need basis, and post-assessment reinforces this by not only revealing student progress in each area, but by giving insight into how we can improve program design in the future.

Research demonstrates that if a child is not reading at grade level by third grade, their ability to meet future academic success and graduate on time is diminished. Teachers know that up to third grade children are learning to read. After third grade, students are reading to learn. According to St. George, it is impossible to be successful in science, social studies, and even mathematics without a strong foundation in reading and literacy.

On average, we see an improvement by 1 to 3 reading levels in our students here at Horizons at Warner. Keeping true to our mission, these levels will account for all and more of the percentage of summer learning loss that we know our students would face without this kind of academic intervention, and leave our students five to six months ahead of where they would have been without Horizons.

Reading TO children

According to Jim Trelease, author of the best-seller, The Read-Aloud Handbook: “Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a ‘pleasure’ message to the child’s brain… You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure” (ReadAloud.org)

Developing a connection between “pleasure” and reading is crucial. Learning is the minimum requirement for success in every field of life.

Our Mission

The Benefits of Reading for Pleasure

Reading for fun has numerous lifelong benefits, and we have ideas for how you can promote this habit among your students.

A teacher and young student sit together and talk.

Why don’t students read? Most teachers have the goal of promoting students’ lifelong love of reading. But why? And what can teachers and parents and librarians do to promote pleasure reading?

In our book Reading Unbound , Michael Smith and I argue that promoting pleasure reading is a civil rights issue. Data from major longitudinal studies show that pleasure reading in youth is the most explanatory factor of both cognitive progress and social mobility over time (e.g., Sullivan & Brown, 2013 [PDF]; Guthrie, et al, 2001 ; and Kirsch, et al, 2002 [PDF]). Pleasure reading is a more powerful predictor than even parental socioeconomic status and educational attainment.

So if we want our students to actualize their full potential as human beings and their capacity to participate in a democracy, and if we want to overcome social inequalities, we must actively promote pleasure reading in our schools, classrooms, and homes.

The Pleasures of Reading

Pleasure reading can be defined as reading that is freely chosen or that readers freely and enthusiastically continue after it is assigned. Our students (like all other human beings!) do what they find pleasurable. You get good at what you practice, and then outgrow yourself by deliberately developing new related interests and capacities.

In our study, we found that reading pleasure has many forms, and that each form provides distinct benefits:

Play pleasure/immersive pleasure is when a reader is lost in a book. This is prerequisite to experiencing all the other pleasures; it develops the capacity to engage and immerse oneself, visualize meanings, relate to characters, and participate in making meaning.
Intellectual pleasure is when a reader engages in figuring out what things mean and how texts have been constructed to convey meanings and effects. Benefits include developing deep understanding, proactivity, resilience, and grit.
Social pleasure is when the reader relates to authors, characters, other readers, and oneself by exploring and staking one’s identity. This pleasure develops the capacity to experience the world from other perspectives; to learn from and appreciate others distant from us in time, space, and experience; and to relate to, reciprocate with, attend to, and help others different from ourselves.
Work pleasure is when the reader develops a tool for getting something functional done—this cultivates the transfer of these strategies and insights to life.
Inner work pleasure is when the reader imaginatively rehearses for her life and considers what kind of person she wants to be and how she can connect to something greater or strive to become something more. When our study participants engaged in this pleasure, they expressed and developed a growth mindset and a sense of personal and social possibility.

Taken together, these pleasures explain why pleasure reading promotes cognitive progress and social possibility, and even a kind of wisdom and wholeness, and, in a larger sense, the democratic project.

Promoting the Pleasures of Reading

We need to help less engaged readers experience these same pleasures. That is our study’s major takeaway: We must make all five pleasures central to our teaching. We need to name them, actively model them, and then assist students to experience them.

To promote play pleasure, use drama techniques like revolving role play, in-role writing, and hot seating of characters in order to reward all students for entering and living through story worlds and becoming or relating to characters in the way that highly engaged readers do.

To promote intellectual pleasure, frame units as inquiry, with essential questions. Read a book for the first time along with your students—figure it out along with them, modeling your fits and starts and problems through think-alouds and discussion. Or pair an assigned reading with self-selected reading from a list, or a free reading choice that pertains to the topic. Use student-generated questions for discussion and sharing. Use discussion structures like Socratic seminar that make it clear there is no teacherly agenda to fulfill as far as topics or insights to achieve.

A whiteboard list of the author’s recent reading

To promote social pleasure, be a fellow reader with students. Put a sign on your door: “Dr. Wilhelm is reading _____.” Read one of their favorite books. Foster peer discussion of reading and response in pairs, triads, small groups, literature circles, book clubs, etc. Do group projects with reading that are then shared and even archived. Have a free reading program and promote books through book talks, online reviews, etc.

To foster work pleasure, use inquiry contexts and work toward culminating projects, including service and social action projects.

To foster inner work pleasure, engage students in imaginative rehearsals for living, inquiry geared toward current and future action, or inquiry for service. Have students think as authors making choices and plan scenarios for characters in dilemmas or those trying to help the characters. Write to the future or to a future self.

Make no mistake, the next-generation standards worldwide require profound cognitive achievements. Meeting such standards and the demands of navigating modern life will require student effort and the honing of strategies over time. Promoting the power of pleasure reading is a proven path there.

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The benefits of reading

From babies to children in their early years and all the way through to early teens, reading brings profound and wide-ranging benefits that can have a lifelong positive impact on children’s lives.

Download the interactive resource

Children who read are more likely to overcome disadvantage caused by inequalities.

They will experience better educational mobility and social mobility. Reading for pleasure has the power to help mitigate socialeconomic inequalities such as low family income and educational background.
Those growing up in poverty are less likely to remain in poverty as adults. A child growing up in poverty who is read to at age five has a significantly higher chance of economic success in their 30s than their peers who are not read to.
They are more likely to overcome the barriers disadvantage presents throughout school. Shared reading has a unique and transformative impact on school attainment. Shared reading at home exerts a stronger influence on children's academic performance than parents' supervision, control of homework or attendance of school activities.
Disadvantaged children who achieve highly at the end of primary school are twice as likely to have been read to at home in their early years, compared to their peers. A child who is an engaged reader provides themselves with self-generated learning opportunities that can be equivalent to several years of education.
The impact of reading for pleasure is four times more powerful on progress in vocabulary, mathematics, and spelling at age 16, than that of parental education or parental socieoconomic status.
Disadvantaged children aged 11-14 who read in their own time and take part in enriching activities at home are more likely to achieve three or more A-levels, compared to those not engaged in these activities.

Children who read are more likely to be happier, healthier, and experience better mental wellbeing and self-esteem.

They feel more secure and develop deep bonds with parents and carers.

Shared reading in the early years supports the development of a child's attachment (how safe, secure and trusting their feel around their parent or carer). Attachment is essential to a child's future happiness, social competence, and ability to form meaningful connections.
Shared reading creates opportunities for joint attention and emotional closeness between a child and their parent or carer. The availability of the parent or carer during shared reading contributes to their sense of safety.
Children with secure attachments are more likely to show enthusiasm and attention during shared reading, which motivates their parent/carer to read with them more frequently and reinforces their opportunity to feel safe, secure and protected.
It is the emotional aspects of shared reading (cuddling, smiling, singing and laughing) that boosts a child's brain activities needed to forge secure attachment, not the parent or carer's reading skill.

They have better sleep and lead healthier lifestyles.

Children aged 3-5 who are read to at bedtime sleep longer. Sleep plays a crucial role in the development of children, impacting their growth, motor skills, attention, behavioural regulation, memory, mood, and resilience.
Children aged 11-14 who read for pleasure have healthier lifestyles. They are less likely to try cigarettes or alcohol, and eat more fruit, irrespective of their family background.

They have a better foundation for healthy social-emotional development.

Reading leads to children's improved social skills, attention, and fewer negative behaviours. Shared reading increases parental warmth and reduces parental stress, enabling them to provide the sensitive and nurturing interactions their babies need to thrive.

They have better mental wellbeing and self-esteem.

By providing escapism and relaxation, reading can act as a protective factor against the adversity some children face. Children who regularly read for pleasure have better self-esteem and lower levels of emotional problems (such as hyperactivity and inattention) than those who don't. Children who read have higher levels of mental wellbeing and happiness.

Children who read are more likely to do better at school and make more progress across the curriculum.

They have better brain development, attentional and cognitive ability.

Children's brains experience the most growth in their first five years, when their brains are the most responsive to their environment. Stimulation from reading books, playing, talking, and singing with a parent/carer serves an important neurological function, enhancing cognitive, physical, social, and emotional growth.
Shared reading among children from low-income backgrounds enhances healthy brain activation in language, attention, memory, self-control, and adjustment. Reading has a long-lasting positive benefit on brain development. An enriching learning environment in their early years can have an impact on a child four decades later.

They have better knowledge about the world and are more ready for learning.

Children who start reading early and continue reading throughout childhood have greater general knowledge. Reading helps to kickstart and sustain a child's ongoing learning journey.
Reading enhances educational attainment. By feeding into cognitive skill development, developing forms of reasoning, complex concepts and imaginative richness, reading supports children to develop problem solving and their intellectual capacities.

They have better language development and literacy skills.

Shared reading provides unparalleled opportunities for a child's verbal interactions with their parent or carer. This cannot be replicated by other activities such as playing with toys, mealtimes or arts and crafts.
Shared reading offers children exposure to rich and novel vocabulary in meaningful contexts and facilitates word learning. Because the focus is entirely on the story, children do not have to extract new words from the stream of ongoing activities like they would in a free-play setting.
There are profound benefits of shared reading for a child's language and literacy outcomes at the start of and throughout school. These include vocabulary size, oral language skills, print awareness, word identification and comprehension skills. These benefits are often found to be independent of family background.
The impact of shared reading on literacy is unique. Among home learning activites such as parental help with reading and writing, playing music or learning the alphabet, only shared reading has a positive influence on literacy assessment at the end of Reception.
The impact of shared reading on literacy is long-lasting. Children who are read to frequently at age five are over half a school year ahead in reading performance at age 15, compared to those qho are read to infrequently or not read to at all.

They make more progress across the curriculum.

Reading for pleasure unlocks academic success across the curriculum. A child who is read to age age 1-2 scores higher in reading, spelling, grammar, and numeracy stills at age 8-11.
Reading for pleasure at the ages of 10 and 16 has a substantial effect on a child's cognitive scores in vocabulary, spelling, and mathematics at age 16.

Children who read are more likely to develop empathy and creativity.

Empathy refers to the ability to value, feel, understand and respect other people's experiences.

Stories can offer children a realistic and authentic 'mirror' of their own lives and experiences and a 'window' to view the experiences of others. When children are emotionally involved in a story, they feel connected to and see their lives as part of the wider human experience. This can be transformative when it comes to developing their empathy.
Children who read books that offer opportunities to empathise with the characters have increased levels of empathy, especially towards stigmatised groups.

They are more imaginative and creative.

Engagement with stories nurtures the disposition and skillset that are fundamental to a child's creativity throughout childhood. Stories with imaginative and magical elements enable children's minds to transcend their immediate context, freeing them from a fixed way of thinking.
By constantly formulating and reformulating their expectations of what might happen in a story, young readers practice mental flexibility, an openness to new situations and interpretations and problem-solving.
A story can also invite dramatisation, opening up children's imagination to give shape to, voice or the opportunity to act it out.
Children who are read to at age three make greater progress in creative development at the end of Reception than those who are not.

For a full list of evidence and references, download the interactive resource.

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More research

Our research and evaluation helps us to continually learn about how to inspire children to read for pleasure. Explore research and reports across early years, primary, secondary and wider reading for pleasure. Find out what impact our programmes have on children and families.

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Home / Essay Samples / Education / Reading / The Power of Reading: Reasons Why Reading Is Important

The Power of Reading: Reasons Why Reading Is Important

Category: Education , Life
Topic: Personal Statement , Reading , Reading Books

Pages: 2 (838 words)

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Reading helps you become a better human being

Reading enriches your imagination, reading gives you a sense of belonging, reading helps build confidence, reading helps you to be more aware, reading keeps you grounded, reading is therapeutic, reading brings joy, conclusion .

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