Importance of Reading and Writing - Essay Example

Many have spent much time talking about reading and writing and how important those skills are to the world. Obviously think that reading is very important, they write for a living and want to think that their work is highly important. And this is true, that reading can be highly important, but this does not mean that reading is highly important – many evidences show that reading can be thoroughly unimportant, and reading itself is not necessarily the answer to every problem. Reading can do things – for me, when I read Life of Pi, it gave me solace, a companion with the same problems as I myself had. For other people it can provide different things – joy, sorrow, laughter, an escape, a justification, or simply a friend. But literate arts will not always provide these things. In some cases, the art is just bad, a book can be poorly written. But even when a book is very good, this does not mean that the book will necessarily be important to the person reading it. It takes a certain kind of person and a certain kind of reading to make a message get across, to make literature do any of the things it can do. But what can literature do? Probably the best thing it can do is show new experiences, and give people a window to the world outside of their life. But this is only true when the reader is ready to get those new experiences, and is reading for the purpose of letting their mind be expanded, otherwise it is a waste. The essay “The Dark Night of the Soul, The Banking Concept of Education” and “The Achievement of Desire” all demonstrate that the benefit of literary art, the passing on of different experiences, can only be had by readers who are ready to accept it, while the essay “Joyas Voladoras” shows how strong literature can be at giving other experiences. The essay “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle gives an very very good example of how literature is good at giving experiences that one would not otherwise be able to have. To provide a starting point for giving the reader new experiences, Doyle uses something every animal has as the basis for his essay: the heart. He says that “mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers, and insects like mollusks have hearts with one chamber” (Doyle, 274) so that the person who is the reader of it can begin to put themselves in line with the other animals he is discussing. It reminds the reader that they have a heart, just like a bug has a heart and a bird has a heart. It is very important that the reader has something to connect to in the work, and in this one it is the heart. Using the heart as the basis of connection, the author then goes on to describe the different types of hearts in the world, and because he has connected that with the reader’s experience, they will hopefully being to imagine what it is like having that heart. When Doyle writes that humming birds have “race-car hearts that gulp up oxygen” it lets the reader imagine how scary it could be to live by that fast paced life (274). So when he says next that “You fry the machine, you melt the engine” when you live that fast, the reader takes it as talking to him or herself. So the final point “every creature on earth has approximately two billions heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or spend them fast, lke a hummingbird, and live to be two years old” (274) the reader really reflects on how they live their lives. This essay shows how good literature can be at showing reader different experiences they would not usually be able to have, by letting the reader feel what it is like to be a humming bird or a whale, and allows them to live through that experience. While “Joyas Voladoras” shows how good books and literature are at communicating experiences to the reader, this does not mean they necessarily have the power to do other things once they have communicated the experience. This is shown best by the Essay “The Dark Night of the Soul,” by Richard E. Miller which talks about how hard it can be to deal with the fact that reading and writing are not as powerful as people sometimes think they are (Miller, 422). In this essay Miller talks about how people who work with literate arts for their work, like authors or teachers, often overestimate the power of books. They think that if people can read and understand books, they will be able to escape the things happening in the world around them, the hate, the pain, the poverty and so on. But this is not the truth. Unfortunately, books and literate arts have only a limited ability to help people, and mostly it can just share experiences to make them feel like they belong, are normal, or some other things. While the first two essays show what literate arts can and cannot do, the next two, “The Banking Concept of Education” by Paulo Freire and “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez show that even the best literature can not always be good at communicating experiences to readers, but that they must come across readers who want to and can deal with the text in the right way. In “The Banking Concept of Education,” Freire describes one of the biggest ways that people can fail to read literate arts the right way. He outlines some problems with the current educational system, such as “The teacher teaches and the students are taught” and “the teacher talks and the students listen” (Friere 319). Basically, the problem is that there is a power imbalance – students feel that they have nothing to add, and teachers feel the same way. But students can also have this relationship with books. They can fail to critically engage. They take what the book says as true and do not question them. This means that they will never get what books have to provide. Richard Rodriguez makes a similar point in his essay “The Achievement of Desire.” In this essay he describes his life, and talks about how he did not deal with books right – to him they were sources of power that let him show up his “parents” because he was “embarrassed by their lack of education” (Rodriguez, 518). To him books were a way out of the world that he did not like and into a new one where he would be powerful, literate and so on. This is a bad way to relate to books because it treats them as a means to an end, rather than dealing with them on their own terms. Books can be very good and very powerful, but only in certain ways. These essays show a number of things. First, one of them shows that books can be very powerful in expressing and communicating experiences to people who have not had that kind of experience. But “Dark Night of the Soul” shows that they can not necessarily do everything that they are supposed to do. And “The Banking Concept of Education” and “ The Achievement of Desire” shows that they can only do what they can do when the reader is willing and able to deal with the literate arts properly, by not trusting it without thinking or using it for their own selfish means. Read More