I do not know if you have ever read out loud to yourself. If you haven’t you should. Even the articles you read on your phone, though perhaps save that for when you are home alone.
When we read aloud, we hear the words we are saying to ourselves, and hearing things can give us very different insights.
Have you ever heard something and it completely distracts everything about your cognitive function? It shuts down all other thoughts and all you can do is focus on it? Reading out loud can do that for you. How many times have you read an article, or read a page or two in a book and thought to yourself, “What did I just read?”
Reading out loud draws your attention to the words and it becomes much more difficult to be distracted. It will slow down your reading pace and force focus as now multiple senses are performing the same task. Reading.
When we read out loud, we also begin to notice when things don’t sound right to us. It is possible to read something in our head, and not give much thought to the argument presented and just accept it. However, when we hear things, we sometimes register disagreement differently, and that is a good thing. We SHOULD read things we do not agree with from time to time.
If you are never reading anything out loud go give it a try. Engage all of your senses that you can in the experience of learning and consuming information. From books to snippets like this one.
Whatever you do, always read. We should be thankful we can. 780 million adults in the world are illiterate and can’t read this or anything else. Think of all the world they are blocked off from, limited only to what they are told. Read out loud, and focus on your amazing skill.
This was a nice piece on reading out loud to yourself. I hope you do one on reading out loud to others, since it's very very different.