If you’re interested in becoming a (better) writer, there are thousands and thousands of people out there eager and willing to help.
Book after book after book has been written on the subject of being a (better) writer, some by well-known writers themselves.
There are certainly hundreds of people who make a living online, telling others how to be(come) a writer, and hundreds more who do it face-to-face at workshops, lectures, and university programs.
Very few people, on the other hand, ever talk about how to be a reader, excluding the kind-hearted folks whose mission it is to combat illiteracy.
And certainly, I’ve never once heard anyone talk about becoming a professional reader, other than in the context of some other profession such as being an editor (fixing other people’s writing) or being a (better) writer yourself.
But I am a professional reader, if such a thing can be said.
All Day, Every Day
When I tell people that I read a lot, they usually assume that I mean that I read a lot of books, which I do, an average of 1-2 per week.
But I also read a lot of articles (whether they’re news articles, “magazine” articles, essays, or blog posts), as in several hundred per week. And when I say that I read them, I mean every word, from top to bottom.
That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, though. I also read billboards, street signs, and announcements posted in stores and shops. I read the wording on people’s T-shirts and clothing.
I read food labels from top to bottom, even when they’re in languages that I don’t speak (in my neck of the woods, a lot of products have multi-lingual packaging because they’re sold across Europe).
I read clothing labels, including the tags with instructions for care and washing. I read the back of products like laundry detergent and shampoo.
I read user agreements, terms and conditions, and terms of service, the stuff that most people click through. I read the “about” pages of websites.
Most of my income these days comes from writing up summaries of official reports from government agencies and NGOs. Most of my “colleagues” in the field just rewrite the executive summary or synopsis at the beginning, but I read through every line of the report, including the footnotes.
Speaking of footnotes, I also read those in books and academic papers and publications in scientific journals. And when I come across something I’m unfamiliar with, I’ll stop and go online to read about those things as well.
Basically, I read everything, including the text at the bottom of the receipt when I buy something. If a scrap of paper blows past me in the street, I’ll stop and pick it up to read it.
In my lifetime, as part of my previous jobs, I estimate that I’ve read at least ten thousand medical charts and somewhere on the order of fifteen thousand transcripts from court cases, phone calls, and police interviews.
Unless it’s written in an alphabet I can’t parse (such as Armenian or Georgian), I read it.
So yeah, I really am a professional reader.
Not Recommended
At this point, you may be wondering whether I suffer from some sort of compulsive disorder. I’ve never been professionally examined for such a thing, but I highly doubt that my behavior stems from some sort of obsession.
Indeed, most of what I do for fun doesn’t involve reading at all, including playing with my dogs, working in the garden, or having a good chat with friends.
Furthermore, if I could go back in time and make some key decisions about the future course of my life, I’d actually choose illiteracy or the complete absence of reading at all.
Why?
First, let me just say that I’ve known or have worked with people with low levels of literacy, sometimes to the point where they can scarcely read a food label or a street sign. And it is undeniable that people with low literacy skills suffer - and suffer a lot.
Instead, what I am talking about is complete and total illiteracy, where you don’t even recognize the meaning of the letters of the alphabet or numbers, where it’s all just meaningless squiggles, akin to a Western person being dropped off in rural China without any clue what those logograms mean.
If my life, I’ve only been privileged enough to meet two people who were 100% illiterate.
One was an elderly black man in the United States who had grown up in rural poverty and denied an education on primarily racial grounds. The other was a young Gypsy boy in Romania who had simply “slipped through the cracks” of the system.
The second I met each of these two individuals, I eagerly began to ask them a few questions to see if I could prove an ancient theory about literacy, and in both cases, I was happy to say that it was, indeed, quite true.
You see, being literate (even just a little), utterly destroys your ability to remember things.
The Ancients Speak
Since I was condemned to literacy as a small child, I’ve had no other choice but to keep on reading, and so I’ve plowed my way through many an ancient text, all the way back to when reading (and writing) was a rather rare skill.
Initially, writing was considered as a kind of strange magic, by which the voices of people in the past (many of whom might even be dead by the time you read the text) were speaking to the reader.
And they meant this quite literally.
For a long time, it was considered mandatory to only read texts aloud (and in public) and never silently to yourself. You can still see traces of this in the Jewish religion.
In synagogues, it is mandatory for the rabbi to read the Torah aloud, and the congregation is never, ever asked to “follow along” by reading (silently) the text themselves. And when a young Jewish boy (or girl) is training for their Bat/Bar Mitzvah (which involves reading the Torah aloud), likewise, they are instructed to always read the text aloud.
Many Orthodox Jewish sects also ban silent reading (even when you’re alone) even today.
In short, the ancients believed that written text was kind of like a “gramophone record,” that had captured the (literal) voice of the author, and the only safe way to “play it back” was to use your voice to breathe life once more into their thoughts and intentions. Not to read texts aloud was like juggling dynamite - it might blow up and severely injure you.
And precisely because reading was so dangerous and volatile, it should be severely restricted to people who were well-trained and prepared to sacrifice themselves, much as we might think of a police “bomb squad” or military “mine clearer” today.
Memory Killers
Beyond the inherent the risks of reading silently (and “trapping” that voice inside your head), the real danger concerning the ability to read was that it would destroy your memory.
The first and most popular written texts of the Ancient Greek world were the Odyssey and the Iliad, ascribed to the legendary poet Homer.
Today, these two texts are often referred to “books,” but it is abundantly clear that they are just the “finalized” and recorded versions of epic poems which were recited aloud by bards and transmitted orally for hundreds of years.
The Iliad clocks in at 15,693 lines of poetry, and the Odyssey has 12,109 lines. How in the world could anyone memorize that amount of material??
Likewise, the ancient Indian epic poem Mahabharata has over 200,000 lines. The Finns have their Kalevala, the Spanish their Cantar de mio Cid, the French their La Chanson de Roland, the Kyrgyz their Epic of Manas, and the people of Mali their Epic of Sundiata, all of which are thousands of lines long.
The English language, of course, has its own epic poem in the form of Beowulf, which has 3,182 lines.
How is it possible that anyone, no matter how dedicated or committed, could memorize such lengthy amounts of material? And pass it on orally across generation after generation without it collapsing into meaningless Chinese whispers (🇺🇸 a game of telephone)?
Today, memorizing a thousand lines of poetry seems borderline supernatural or the realm of idiot savants or folks endowed with “photographic memories.” But clearly, the prevalence in the ancient world of so many lengthy poems (always recited aloud) speaks to the fact that memorizing epic works was not that astounding or rare.
Indeed, there are a host of ancient professions known as bards, skalds, rhapsodes, rakugo, and scops, whose sole job was to recite lengthy passages of poetry and epic stories completely from memory. And many of these people performed while drinking alcohol!
Millenials
It really wasn’t until around the year 1000 AD that people started reading silently. And I think it’s safe to say that this is when our ability to remember things began to collectively suffer.
Today, if you (silently) read the internet, you’ll see lots of complaints about the inability to remember books people have read or forget most of what they’ve learned in school.
The internet is also full of “helpful” solutions to this “problem,” such as avoiding using a smartphone, avoiding using Google, blaming yourself for not paying enough attention, getting more sleep, eating better, taking written notes while you read, or using mnemonics and “brain hacks.”
Nowhere, however, will you ever read that the act reading itself is actually what is shredding your ability to remember things.
Indeed, it’s now considered perfectly normal to forget the vast majority of everything you have ever done, seen, read, or learned.
But is it really reading that’s to blame for our weakened memorization skills?
Well, that’s what the ancients said, so when I encountered those two fortunate individuals who were completely illiterate, I immediately began probing their ability to remember things.
Sure enough, although no one had ever asked them about it before in that context, they were each able to easily rattle off vast amounts of information.
The elderly black man in the United States easily recalled times, dates, places, and a long list of names of people, including neighbors and politicians, and what each one had done and when they had done it and even what the weather had been like on that day.
The Gypsy kid, on the other hand, was fascinated with mobile phones, and he recited to me a lengthy catalog of technical specifications for all of his favorite phone models. I seriously doubt that even the Nokia engineers who built them could bring all of that information to mind so easily.
So yes, as far as I can determine, literacy really is the enemy of memorization.
Believe me, I’m a professional reader, so I know.