The history of reading, according to an article I read, revolves around the transition from reading out loud to reading silently.

Main point: “As reading shifted away from the social, some researchers believe this helped create what we now call an interior life.”

More about it:

• Reading out loud was the practice for centuries. “The default assumption in the classic period, if you were reading around other people, you’d read aloud and share it.”
• “There isn’t much consensus between historians on why people would have started reading silently.” Some reasons include:
  • “…the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words.”
  • “…helped facilitate intellectual rigor, introspection, criticism of the government and religion, even irony and cynicism that would have been awkward to read aloud.”
  • “…a shift in the way words were laid out a page facilitated the change.”
  • “…visual changes made to texts, like punctuation and word spaces—changed the way we read.”

Why it matters:

It was another step toward creating a sense of privacy.

Silent reading could go faster, making it possible to learn more in the same amount of time.

Reading in general engages the mind and promotes cognitive endurance.

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