WHY READ ALOUD?
Reading a book or story aloud to family members, friends, students, colleagues, or fellow writers is a very different experience, for the reader and the listener, than the experience of listening to an audio book. An op/ed in today's New Y0rk Times by Verylyn Klinkenbord, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times and the author of The Rural Life, Making Hay, The Last Fine Time and Timothy, states:
". . . listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.
Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.
No one understood this better than Jane Austen. One of the late turning points in “Mansfield Park” comes when Henry Crawford picks up a volume of Shakespeare, “which had the air of being very recently closed,” and begins to read aloud to the young Bertrams and their cousin, Fanny Price. Fanny discovers in Crawford’s reading “a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with.” And yet his ability to do every part “with equal beauty” is a clear sign to us, if not entirely to Fanny, of his superficiality."
Read more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/opinion/16sat4.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
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