In her Atlantic Monthly article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” Rose Horowitch interviews English professors at prestigious universities who report that the majority of their students refuse to read full-length books. 

Horowitch explains that these college students never practiced reading longform text in high school. Their teachers, facing increasingly limited attention spans, assigned only individual chapters from classic texts or opted for a short story rather than a novel from a celebrated author.

At Riveting Results, we have repeatedly seen how reading whole books can transform how students view reading and how they view the potential of their English class.

Below, a teacher describes how reading Frederick Douglass’ entire Narrative of a Life of a Slave gave a student enough time to become engaged and to develop a particularly powerful insight into the text, the substance of which we will discuss in an upcoming blog post. Once that insight was shared, and the student’s self-confidence was transformed, the class read Douglass for three more weeks. During that time, the student had time to express and internalize her newfound assertiveness as a reader.

I had a student who was skeptical about reading the novels on our syllabus. When we started Frederick Douglass, I got a lot of groaning, a lot of complaints [from her]. Then, [after we had been reading for a while] she all of a sudden made [a] connection. The students were having some difficulty understanding the language but what I saw in her was not only did it connect with her, but she was able to explain it to others. And she shared a moment in her writing that was so profound for her, for everyone else when they were writing. And it was amazing to see her come out of her shell. After this, she didn’t say I don’t want to read this anymore. She wasn’t as skeptical…[From then on], her writing was focused… She truly [was able to] understand  Frederick Douglass.