Who has time to read these days?

Teaching reading to those who struggle with it is one of my passions. I cannot imagine a life in which I was unable to read and I firmly believe that no child should be denied either the pleasure or the practical uses of reading because of inadequate teaching.

But I’m beginning to wonder whether, at some point, the ability to read will cease to play such an important part of our lives. Will future generations look back at our times and wonder why we made such a big deal of it?

Experts on using the social media for business suggest that we monitor the response to our social media updates to see which kind of posts are most ‘engaging’. Facebook provides us with ‘Insights’ to measure just that and, as predicted, it’s updates with images, the bigger the better, that get the most response.

Great! As an artist/designer, I’m happy to provide images for my updates, accompanied by just a few lines of text, a link and maybe a hashtag or two. Excellent! Easy! 

But wait – is anyone actually reading the text? Some of the hilariously inappropriate comments I’ve had suggest that the answer is 'no'! And is anyone clicking on the link? Analytics suggest that clicks on the links are few and far between.

Which all leads me to ask the questions, how often are we bothering to read? 
Have Infographics made it too easy for us to get by without reading whole sentences, never mind paragraphs? 

I say ‘we’ because I know I am as guilty as anyone of absorbing the immediate impact of an image and clicking on the ‘like’ button, maybe adding a brief comment and even on some occasions, hitting the ‘share’ button; though when it comes to facebook’s exhortation to ‘write something about this’, I usually pass.

I think it’s all about time and its habit of disappearing so fast,  especially when we’re on the internet! 

The problem is that there’s a finite amount of time

 available to us to glance at, mentally classify, discard or actually absorb

an infinite amount of ‘content’. 

No wonder we are picky about what we actually spend our precious time reading!

Advice on writing for blogs invariable points out that most people ‘skim’ rather than read carefully and thoughtfully, word for word. I know it's true; I do it myself! So we must use bullet points, ‘headlines’ and the blogging equivalent of ‘sound-bites’ in our writing to make skimming easier.

I wonder whether the days of the blog are numbered. Not that I think they are going to disappear tomorrow; but the way things are moving, with almost purely visual sites like Pinterest growing like the proverbial mushrooms, who will bother to actually read a 500-word dissertation – unless it’s either so rich in meaning or uproariously amusing that it draws us in.

Is this a bad thing? 

Not necessarily. I’m all in favour of Infographics – I think they’re a brilliant way of communicating and, by the way, teachers have used them for years. They just called them Wall Charts or possibly Visual Aids.

But I do think it would be regrettable if the ability to read became devalued over time. There are so many books that I love to read over and over and I doubt whether a film or a video clip could ever replace them! 

What do you think?

Picture Books for Children

'Picture Books no longer a staple for children' was a headline of a NY Times article last week. 

How very depressing! Although I’ve never quite dipped my toe in the water of Children’s Book Illustration, it’s nevertheless something I feel quite passionately about. Just as I view greeting cards as one way of making art available to all, I see picture books as one way of bring art to small children. And it’s not just any old art; some of the artists I most admire - too many to name them all! - are or have been children’s book illustrators! 


According to the article, it’s not just the economic downturn that is threatening the sales of picture books. That would be understandable and hopefully temporary. No, the suspicion is that book-buying parents are ‘hot-housing’ their children by encouraging them to read chapter books at an ever younger age. No doubt they think they are supporting their child’s education but in many cases leaving out the picture book stage is counterproductive.

This may sound very odd coming from someone who insists on teaching children to read using story books with few or no pictures at all! But there is a good reason (or two!) for that. In the early stages of learning to read, we want to train children to read every word from left to right to give their reading skills a solid foundation. We don’t want them ‘guessing from the pictures’, a strategy that some popular but ill-founded reading programs have, in the past, suggested. If they use an illustration to guess a word, they are not actually learning to read! A bad habit that they will at some point need to get out of.

Another reason for avoiding pictures in the early stages of learning to read is that part of the skill of reading, especially with those to whom it doesn’t come easily, consists of training their eyes to follow the text in sequence from left to right on the page. Pictures can be a great distraction that causes their eyes to flick back and forth all over the page!

So for ‘learning to read’ purposes, the fewer the illustrations the better.

But there is more to reading that just decoding the words on the page, much, much more! It’s first and foremost about instilling in the child a love of books, something that will probably last them a lifetime! I’ve always found it sad to discover children who grow up with no books at all in their homes. So beginning with wonderfully illustrated picture books, some with just a few words and others with no words at all, a whole treasure trove of experience is opened up to the child! I remember one of my grandsons, long before he even began to read, studying the pages of picture books with an intensity that amazed me and I have a photo of my granddaughter, fast asleep but still clutching her picture book tightly in her hand!

Often, if the illustrations are any good, no words at all are necessary to fire the imagination of a child. The story will build naturally in his head! And gradually the introduction of text, read to the child until he is able to read it himself, will lead on seamlessly to a desire to learn to read independently.


During my time as a remedial literacy tutor, again and again, I’ve had parents proudly  telling me about the ‘text-heavy’ chapter books their children read to themselves at night in bed. If the child has any difficulties with reading, this is a step backwards. I know precisely what the children are capable of reading accurately and I know for certain that the books they are reading at home are beyond their reading skills and this is potentially disastrous. They will get into the habit of skimming the page and guessing and when asked to read out loud, there will be little relation to the actual words that are on the page! Not a good way to become a fluent reader!

So I would say to parents who are leaving out this crucial stage of capturing a child’s interest in books and reading, through picture books: please think again; there’s no rush to get on to chapter books! Let you child enjoy the wonderful art available through children’s book illustrators. Lay the foundations for a lifelong love of books, of reading and for that matter of art as well and let your child dictate the pace.

Learning to read and reading, or being read to, for pleasure are two related but quite separate activities; neither should be neglected and the enjoyment of beautifully illustrated picture books is one of the foundation stones on which the enduring habit of reading is built. 

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