Documentary Analysis: Why Reading Matters

Even in the midst of technology, reading is such a fundamental part of our world nowadays. The world completely revolves around technology, but even in the midst of all of this reading is still a crucial part of everyday life. A documentary titled Why Reading Matters argues and proves that the brain must change physiologically to read. However, reading also changes a person on the emotional and psychological side. Reading influences people for good by adding to a person’s mental and social interaction, providing a sense of escape, and changing a person’s morals. Reading provides and builds the reader’s imagination and empathy towards others. Tim Gillespie supports this argument with analysis and by saying that reading. “…is the cultivation

He closes his argument by saying that when reading adds these two things in a person’s life, it gives the reader a way, “to better understand themselves and others” (Gillespie para. 19). Christina Chant Sullivan also supports this argument by giving real life examples of her experience with this with her own students. She gives evidence to prove her point with her first example being how her students reacted to the well-known book, The Hunger Games. She describes their reaction to the book as engaged and interested in the twisted and demented fiction book that Suzanne Collins created. Sullivan says that, “Even my most reluctant writers exceeded the four page minimum I had set for them” (52). This shows that the writing prompt over this book not only stretched the boy’s mental imagination, but also their writing imagination. She later supports the empathy that is input in readers by the description of how the same kids reacted to a book that was more realistic and heart touching. She describes her children’s reaction to the book, A Long Walk to Water, in their writing assignment as, “pages of outrage, compassion, and fundraising ideas” (Sullivan

John Gardner discusses this all in his article where he defines a lot of fiction as “moral fiction” because it holds this power to influence people. He says early on in the article that “Moral fiction communicates meanings discovered by the process of the fictions creation” (Gardner 108). This quote asserts this argument well because it shows that the books are given meaning and moral through the writing process and that the reader can absorb this into their life. Karen Swallow prior also argues for the moral influence of reading by declaring it can, “touch the human soul” (para. 7). Later, she boldly asserts that what we read will impact us in some way (Swallow para. 13). Gregory Currie concurs with these other arguments by saying that reading can, “…generate powerful insight…[and] fiction is able to give us scenarios that make vivid the details of a moral issue, while allowing us to think them through without the distortions wrought by personal interest” (para. 6). He later continues by asserting that reading “gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake. Literature helps us, in other words, to be, or to come closer to being, moral “experts” (Currie para. 9). Both of these quotes prove