Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

Some of the more disconcerting and surprising letters I have received over the last years have come from professors of literature and the social sciences who are flummoxed over their college students’ impatience with older, denser American literature and writing. One chair of a well-known English department wrote that he could no longer teach his once sought-after seminar on Henry James because too few students today wanted or were able to read James. Among those professors, the most frequent observations are two. The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.