Don’t Let TV Crowd Out Reading
EXPANDING the boundaries of the intellectual wasteland in every direction is the all-pervasive influence of television. In the United States, where there are almost seventy-five million homes with TV, the average eighteen-year-old has spent more hours (15,000) before television than in school. An environment has been spawned in which writers write with a view to having their work used on television.
“When TV moved to the forefront of the popular consciousness, the sense of literary tradition began to disappear from American writers,” author Norman Mailer charged at a Yale University symposium. Why work your heart out for literary excellence when a steamy, sexy plot, spun in a flashy style, will sell to television for more money than it will bring in book form? Besides—who reads books anymore? Isn’t it a waste of time and effort when the work will come out on TV any day?
Because 70 percent of Americans have come to depend on television and radio for their evening news, for the past two decades afternoon newspapers, large and small, have simply gone out of business. For example, the New York Daily News (evening edition) and such established institutions as the Washington Star and the Philadelphia Bulletin ceased publication in quick succession in 1981.
Do you realize what a robber of our intellect television can be? TV, like the movies, comes at us through our eyes and through our ears. It totally dominates our two major senses. It stages the action. It commands the whole field of attention. What thinking is done is done by it. It carries the ball every exploratory inch of the way, every imaginative moment of the time. We don’t need to think or care or wonder or question. We huddle before it, reduced to mental zombies, not exercising our own thinking abilities.
Yet thinking, which is mental activity, requires exercise like a muscle. “Safeguard practical wisdom and thinking ability,” urges the Bible proverb, “and they will prove to be life to your soul and charm to your throat.”—Proverbs 3:21, 22.
Publishers of books and magazines try frantically to cut across the audiovisual dominance of television. They entice us with more illustrations and fewer words. For the most part they cater to the sensual, the prurient, the sensational or whatever they feel will give them a competitive edge for every reader they can get.
In this avalanche of intellectual and moral pollution are we to give up in quest of a valuable and rewarding education? If not, what is a reliable course to follow? Become a reader!
Cultivate the Art of Reading
Do you want to mature to the full extent of your mental capacities? Do you reach out for the highest values in life? Are you conscious of your spiritual needs? If you want to develop in such directions you must still rely primarily on the written word.
Words solidified in writing (print), unlike the fleeting image on the TV screen, are permanent. We can pause as we read them. We can turn back to them. We can meditate, ponder, draw conclusions from what they tell us, learn a lesson, stretch and flex our mental abilities in the process. But without realizing it our mental reflexes may become flabby, even retarded, by long and continuous diversion to television. Our attention span may become abbreviated. Television with its intensely concentrated scenes, fractured every few minutes by commercial breaks, may condition us to tire prematurely from prolonged concentration. Our intellectual staying power may become exhausted.
Publishers of books and magazines are aware of this. They know that solid columns of print unrelieved by visual aids repel the average reader. The short, lively illustrated account is more apt to hold our attention. If a subject is long and involved, its prospects of riveting us are better if the material is segmented. For instance, it may be broken up in one- or two-page layouts dominated by imaginative subtitles and pertinent excerpts or pointers boxed in the margins—along with visual aids.
Form an Appetite for Reading
Don’t let anything keep you from a steady reading diet. When your mind pushes reading matter away, pull it back with your hand. Force your eyes to consume the words as a nurse does when insisting that the child open its mouth and take the spoon. Immerse your mental processes in the stream of words until your intellect swims in comprehension.
Reading is communication. Are there not many great minds you want to communicate with? Some of the words and wisdom of the greatest minds in human history are caught and preserved in recorded words. Feast on them. Angels also have spoken words that men recorded. And most important, God himself has given words of life for men of all ages. They are preserved in the holy Bible, the Scriptures. When you read the Scriptures yourself you realize that “the word of God is alive and exerts power.”—Hebrews 4:12; Luke 1:19; 9:35; John 8:40; 2 Timothy 3:16, 17.
Dig Out the Meaning of Words
If you do not read with ease, don’t give up. You can learn. Tackle the problem with gusto. Most likely your problem begins with your not being familiar with many words. But how many of us are? In the English language there are over 1,000,000 words. More than a million words. The average adult uses only 30,000 to 60,000. Imagine what we’re missing.
When the meaning of a word is hidden, think of it as a kernel encased in a shell. We crack the shell, we extract the nut and find that it is rich, delicious and nutritious. Words are rewarding that way. Don’t throw one away before you crack the mystery of its meaning. Learning a new word excites imagination. It inspires similes—you find yourself saying “It’s like this” or “It’s like that—like a diamond scintillating light in many directions.” Every new word lights up the intellect in some area never quite reached before.
What’s the first thing to do when you see a word you don’t know? A member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel says the first thing he does is try to guess the meaning from the way it’s used. What would the surrounding words reveal if that word were missing? Already we are getting clues.
But don’t just guess or wonder. Crack the nut! Look up the word in the dictionary.
Let’s say you run across the word “catalyst”:
“Harvey’s sense of humor proved to be the catalyst that relieved the grimness of that night for all of us.”
We have a good idea, just from the context, of what “catalyst” means. But would you feel confident in using the word just yet? Let’s find out exactly what “catalyst” means before we add it to our active vocabulary:
‘CATʹA-LYST, n, a substance which either speeds up or slows down a chemical reaction, but which itself undergoes no permanent chemical change thereby.’—Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary.
Besides having a basic chemical connotation, “catalyst” is a good word to describe how Harvey’s humor ‘slowed down’ or eased or relieved a grim episode. But what is underneath the meaning? What are the roots of the tree that produced the nut?
We find “catalyst” in the midst of a whole family of kindred words. Directly above it in the dictionary is the noun “ca-talʹy-sis.” Among other things the dictionary tells us it is formed by joining two Greek roots, kata, down, and lyein, to loosen.
This digging a word up by the roots educates us in many ways. It helps us remember words. It deepens our understanding of words we already know. It opens up whole new families of words at a time. Speech authorities tell us this is the biggest reward from going to the dictionary, this learning the root meaning.
We find columns of words above and below “catalyst,” all starting with “cata” from the Greek kata, down. Here are a few:
“Catachresis,” [kata, down or against, charesthai, to use] the “down-use” or misuse of a word—something we want to guard against.
“Cataclysm,” [kata, down, klysein, wash] a deluge.
“Catastrophe,” [kata, down, strephein, to turn] ruin, calamity, disaster . . . A world of words opens up just from one simple root.
Word power starts here. Extended meanings are gained by adding prefixes, front attachments, and suffixes, rear attachments. Look at what happens to the word “form” when we add a prefix such as “con” or “in” or “re”; or when we add suffixes such as “er” or “ing” or “less.”
Spending time studying the introductory material in the front of a good dictionary is an education in itself. And whether in school or out, you can gain reading power by developing a good dictionary habit, as illustrated here.
What Is There Worth Reading?
Amid all the welter of trash that crowds the newsstands and bookstores there is always something worth while to be searched out and read. But what is a safe guide to good reading? One of the best guides to reading or any other form of communication was recorded almost two thousand years ago: “Whatever things are true, . . . of serious concern, . . . righteous, . . . chaste, . . . lovable, . . . well spoken of, . . . whatever virtue there is and whatever praiseworthy thing there is, continue considering these things.”—The Bible, at Philippians 4:8.