In Favor of Reading Aloud | Hacker News Reader

In Favor of Reading Aloud

raptitude.com

19 pointsironyman16 comments

In middle school, we were read Homer's Odyssey, and were tasked with memorizing and reciting folk stories. As an adult, I read short stories and novellas to my wife. It's a valuable intellectual and creative muscle to exercise, along with silent reading and writing. It also helps with public speaking.

It might be fun to be able to do a book circle where folks read aloud chapters & can swap those recordings.

I've fallen out of the habit of reading aloud, but for a while I did find it to be profoundly fun.

Interesting! Glad to know I'm not the only one who has this habit.

some things are _meant_ to be read aloud because they were written that way one way or another. For the majority of history, it was the norm, either in consumption, authorship, or both.

Poetry is meant to be spoken, with rare exception. Written records of oral-first material, from the hobbit to the epistles (it's in the name!) to the just so stories (also in the name!) are all meant to be read aloud.

Some works, nearly all of which are 20th c. or later, are meant to be read silently, and are actively hard to read out loud.

> For the majority of history, it was the norm, either in consumption, authorship, or both.

Come again?

It was normative for things to be either authored by dictation, received by listening, or both.

I read The Hobbit aloud to my wife at bedtimes about 2 years back. Challenging at first, but it got easier, and I think we both enjoyed it.

back to the origins!

I've done similar, and also with LoTR. It worked very well.

my wife and I sometimes do bedtime reading to each other where either she reads an english story, or I read one in her mother tongue: fun, social, and (often) even educational!

Lagniappe: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1960/06/25

>epistles (it's in the name!)

Epistle means letter or written communication.

it does. They were public letters that would’ve been read aloud to a group.

Ah, OK.

Could you provide an example of a work that is actively hard to read aloud?

Any technical paper written in the last century.

A surprising number of children's books -- either they're too simple, or too! over! punctuated?! or just carelessly written.

Poems whose shape is as important as their sound or sense -- like https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47244/buffalo-bill-s

things written without a care towards euphony. I think fantasy/scifi that clearly never intends anyone to attempt to _pronounce_ the names of characters or locations fall into this, but other things do too.

I've read the entire harry potter series aloud to my kids. I don't think I have spoken so many words in my life. My throat would be raw after long chapters.

When we read - we are never truly silent...

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