Read Aloud Well

The only way to truly share a book is...

There is nothing wrong with reading to yourself. In fact, reading to yourself is incredible, in the original sense of the word: it is almost unbelievable. It took a revolution of soul and mind for people to realize that they not only could read to themselves, but that it could open up new ways of writing and reading. 

For most of human history, the assumption of those who could read was that the words were meant to be read aloud, often socially or to groups. Our default setting, that reading is for individual and silent absorption, did not become dominant until the 19th century. A good example of this is the manner in which poetry has been written and read: not until the 20th century did forms of poetry emerge that work best on the page, read by individuals, each having their own unique experience with the work.

Much ink has been spilled, and the bindings of many books have been glued, in the study of this fascinating subject. Augustine, around the year 400, found Ambrose’s habit of reading silently remarkable:

Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. Often when we came to his room--for no one was forbidden to enter, nor was it his custom that the arrival of visitors should be announced to him--we would see him thus reading to himself. After we had sat for a long time in silence--for who would dare interrupt one so intent?--we would then depart, realizing that he was unwilling to be distracted in the little time he could gain for the recruiting of his mind, free from the clamor of other men’s business. Perhaps he was fearful lest, if the author he was studying should express himself vaguely, some doubtful and attentive hearer would ask him to expound it or discuss some of the more abstruse questions, so that he could not get over as much material as he wished, if his time was occupied with others. And even a truer reason for his reading to himself might have been the care for preserving his voice, which was very easily weakened. Whatever his motive was in so doing, it was doubtless, in such a man, a good one. 

Some have argued that this passage is about Ambrose’s rudeness in not speaking to visitors, but this is an anachronism brought on by temporal snobbery. We belong to such a thoroughly individualistic and written-word culture that we forget what language was originally for: speaking! Language is first oral. 

This is not to mention that such a reading of the text does little to explain Augustine’s amazement, or, more pointedly, his subsequent conjecture that Ambrose might be saving his voice. No one’s voice is strained by small talk, but reading some bedtime Tolkien to the kids will, in fact, tax the voice box.

According to Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading, when regular people started reading silently, the nature of reading itself changed.

But with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

Perhaps Alberto gets carried away in describing this intimate revolution, but I sympathize. He is aware of a life of the mind that is not at all to be taken for granted. Let us forgive his evangelistic zeal, but also be aware that our lack of awareness of this oh-so-exciting novelty is that it is no novelty at all. Not now. Now it is the water our minds swim in, i.e. individualism and isolation.

Although Rousseauism and belly-button gazing are rampant in our society, making it easy to decry the evils of individualism, I am glad for individuality and the dignity of the individual that is guaranteed by the Gospel. I love to read silently, or as we usually put it, “to myself”. However, if you’ve ever read Chesterton or Wodehouse, you have surely thought to yourself at one point or another that those whom you love needed to hear this too.

You want to read aloud.

You ought to read aloud to others, and to think of reading as rhetoric. The word rhetoric has suffered injurious changes over the past couple of centuries, but I will here seek to redeem its classical meaning.

Rhetoric is used to dismiss language that we think is false or specious (“that’s just rhetoric"), is vanity (“that’s empty rhetoric”), or is merely conjectural (as in rhetorical question). It is not seen as anything substantial.

Those who study rhetoric as art and science have a more dispassionate view. The definition most widely accepted among students of rhetoric as it was taught classically is that it is most simply “the art of persuasion”. 

This explains why the word is mostly used negatively today. As clinically and neutrally as we might put that definition, the modern world has taught us to suspect anyone passionate enough to try to convince us of their point of view. “Just the facts, m’am.” As moderns, we tend to believe that newspapers and other media should be objective and just tell the truth, as if the truth were some isolable thing out there that Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw would be able to distill and pass to us unfiltered. Anyone trying to convince us of something is trying to sell us something, or otherwise take advantage of us. For many, the phrase “fiery rhetoric” makes us think first, not of Winston Churchill, but of Adolf Hitler. 

The first politicians to adapt to radio and then television had an enormous rhetorical advantage over their opponents. The first televised debate directly between candidates for the American presidency is often held up as an example of this. John F. Kennedy was tan, handsome, direct, and debonair. Richard Nixon wore a gray suit, which was terrible for the camera, and bumbled through his lines. Perhaps you believe, like I do, that Kennedy was an incompetent shell of a man, and so your dislike of “empty rhetoric” only increases. But let us take those quotation marks off. What you hate is empty rhetoric, and you hate it because it is empty, not because it is rhetoric. 

The good guys should employ rhetorical devices, because truth is accompanied by beauty and goodness. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and if that is true, it will present the truth in beauty and goodness. We have been taught to believe that our true selves are hidden away somewhere, abstracted from any of the accidents of nature. And we generally believe it, until our teenager wants to get a job. Then we remember the truth: all of these things work together, to persuade, through exterior shows, of an interior truth. We tell our teenagers when they’re off to a job interview to brush their hair, look people in the eye, and speak clearly; we would be dismayed if that teenager replied by saying that their prospective employer should just care about “me as a person”.

Many in the world of classical education today apply rhetoric principally to the written word, to essays and printed speeches. Our entire educational framework is constructed around the written word, and few teachers have themselves been taught the art of speaking well, so naturally the original purpose of the canons of rhetoric is neglected. 

The five canons of rhetoric are discovery, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Rhetoric was, above all, used for speaking well. Speech-giving requires memory, which elicited the creation of mnemonic devices like the famed memory palaces, and the devising of exercises for strengthening memory. Speech-giving also requires good delivery, despite our most modern and postmodern of wishes that people would just pay attention to the “real me” of our argument, without requiring that it brush its hair first. Writers of yore like Cicero and Quintillian wrote at length about how to stand, how to hold one’s robe, how to use one’s hands, and how to project one’s voice.

The Latin term for that fifth canon, delivery, is pronuntiatio. This is not to say that good delivery in oratory was seen simply as good pronunciation. Far from it. To pronounce was to message forth. Nonetheless, we see that it is no great leap to claim that how we say our words, or in the case of texts read aloud, how we pronounce them, should be a basic concern of good communication.

What good is it to have found the most beautiful of word choices in your speech, if your audience does not understand you, or has to work to process your pronunciation? What virtue is there in pausing your smoothly delivered lecture to read a quote from someone else, only to have your halting delivery rob you of your rhetorical power (known as your ethos in rhetoric circles)?

Your decision to read out loud well is a rhetorical decision. Reading out loud is part of your calling to be a blessing to the world. You could read Beatrix Potter to your daughter, or Verses upon the Burning of our House to your spouse. You could turn a newspaper article into a newspaper story, or convey the true meaning of a famous quote by your rhythm or inflection.

Reading ought to reify. Reification is making something abstract or unembodied real. It’s thingifying something. Reading aloud shares with all other forms of speech an aspect of language that is lost when we read to ourselves: words are not incarnated or thingified into their true selves when they arrive to us through symbols, but rather, do so when they are spoken. We do not want to spiral into some dark semiotic hole with this thought, or end up on the left bank of the Seine smoking cigarettes and balefully pondering the ultimate loneliness of man. Instead, let us think incarnationally, of the best reality: not of limitation, but the possibilities of making things with speech.

You may have your own childhood experience with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You can want the same experience for your children, and have each of them read the book, each having a similar but unique experience. You may all delight in the book, and you may all talk about that delight, but you will not have an experience truly held in common until you make that common experience a reality, its own thing. You must read it together, perhaps by a fireplace with hot chocolates in hand; only now do you actually share the thing.