[Mike Slippkauskas]

Sphere,

I'm just wondering -- how many of us read our fellows' productions aloud before critiquing? How important do we feel that is? What are your specific rituals when reading newly posted work?

Mike Slipp

[Roger Slater]

I'm not sure I have just two ways of reading, "aloud" or "silently" -- it's more like a spectrum. I can read "silently" in the sense that someone in the room may not know or hear what I'm reading, but if I read slowly, with attention to sonics, and attentive to my mind's ear, it is not "silent" for me, certainly not silent in the way that reading a newspaper article is silent, for example. If I throw in a little bit of sub-vocalization, I believe it's pretty much the same effect as reading "aloud." At times it may be even better, since my mind's voice has much better elocution and delivery than my full-throated vocal chords.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited September 27, 2006).]

[Quincy Lehr]

Yeah, I usually mumble through them in a more or less inaudible register.

Quincy

[Lance Levens]

Mike

I read silently several times until I feel my vocal chords engaging. Then, I make a decision--intuitive, hopefully well-informed--do I or don't I open up the stops and put the piece to the full test: a full-on, out loud reading a la A. Hopkins or A. Quayle. That's fun!

Best

Lance Levens

[Mark Allinson]

Since I live alone, which is in itself a worry for the locals, the last thing I need is for my neighbours to hear me talking to myself.

So I read in silence.

Safest way.

[Tim Murphy]

I subliterate everything I read, except what I declaim to the heavens.

[Mark Allinson]

Ah, yes, Tim. When I am alone on the beach I can declaim to the heavens, where only the seagulls look askance.

[Janet Kenny]

Musicians learn to read scores silently. Poets can do the same. Often the performance fails to do justice to the poem. Conversely, sometimes a performance can elevate mediocre material.

[Chris Childers]

I also subvocalize everything, which is why I am a slow reader. Quick skimming where your eyes just slide over the words without at least mentally filling them out seems difficult and unnatural, and I absorb very little when I do that. I memorize out loud though, which may be why I don't know more poems; my voice gets worn down pretty quickly.

Chris

[Mark Allinson]

Alberto Manguel, in his A History of Reading tells of how Augustine was surprised to find Ambrose reading without moving his lips. Apparently, this was unique at this time. Chapter 2 may be read online here

Here is a short passage:

Ambrose was an extraordinary reader. "When he read," said Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."4

Eyes scanning the page, tongue held still: that is exactly how I would describe a reader today, sitting with a book in a cafe across from the Church of St. Ambrose in Milan, reading, perhaps, Saint Augustine's Confessions. Like Ambrose, the reader has become deaf and blind to the world, to the passing crowds, to the chalky flesh-coloured facades of the buildings. Nobody seems to notice a concentrating reader: withdrawn, intent, the reader becomes commonplace.

To Augustine, however, such reading manners seemed aufficiently strange for him to note them in his Confessions. The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 27, 2006).]