On The Importance Of Reading Gioia Summary

Gioia identifies all that is at stake in a world where reading is obsolete in his essay On the Importance of Reading. He paints imagery to show the comparisons of readers and non readers as well as the affects literacy and illiteracy have on the world. Gioia asserts his opinions on why reading is losing the battle of popularity. According to Gioia a person who reads is civic-minded, active, empathic, and imaginative. Gioia expresses the opposite benefits are true of illiterate or semi literate people they lead passive lives, are less likely to volunteer, and less imaginative. Among all of these benefits of reading Gioia identifies, he writes in depth about empathy gained through reading. I also feel one of the greatest benefits of reading

He uses techniques like shock factors an hyperbole to cause a reaction in the reader to make change. Gioia explains things with statistics but he spreads a thick layer of bias on top. “There are now a few more non-readers than readers. If we allow the problem to get much worse, the better part of this cultural capacity for reading, imagination, civic engagement, and human enlargement will be irrecoverable” (423). This is a shocking claim and Gioia knows it, Gioia uses facts and statistics throughout his essay to gain a reaction from the masses. He is making a stand for rapid change, pick up a book, he screams in many words. Become the amazing person he describes as a reader become a literate literary lush. Gain empathy beyond your current capacity and leave the passive, uncivic, unimaginative, and culturally limited life behind you. Read and make this doomed world a literate and truly intellectual free society. Personally I don't feel that a lack of reading will cause doom to the world but I do feel that reading can be beneficial and often opens us up to so many

With that empathy gained from reading a person would be more likely to be civic-minded, be active in their choices and actions, and of course reading creates imagination. Empathy is not created by reading, empathy is not only for the literate. The fact that a person does or does not hold the skills to understand text is not a determining factor in whether or not they can show compassion and understanding for another or a situation. However, I do feel that reading allows a person to broaden that innate empathy through literature and learn of others lives, predicaments and struggles that are not like their own. Being able to read helps expose a person to the diversity of new worlds where norms collide and rights are taken and given. Worlds where morals can grow and shift and beliefs can take hold and wilt or strengthen. All from the text in a book, on screen, or found on the page of a newspaper or magazine. “What literature does—nowhere more powerfully than in fiction (the novel and the short story)—is put us in the inner lives of other people in the dailyness of their psychological, social, economic, and imaginative existence. This makes us feel, more intensely probably than anything else, the reality of other points of view, of other lives”(Gioia 422). The following text is an example of an essay that causes readers to empathize and understand