Sosnoski Article Response

I honestly had some difficulty following the Sosnoski article. It was fairly interesting even though it was a difficult read. The parts of the article that I followed and understood were interesting and shed some light on the thoughts of hyper-reading, however, I had still had trouble following the author’s thoughts and therefore had issues discerning the deeper meanings of this article. Since I had trouble deciding the exact meaning of the article I will try to explain and illustrate what I actually managed to extract from it.

I did actually enjoy reading about the eight different issues of reading that Sosnoski hit on even though the introduction was fairly slow moving and drawn out. The problems such as de-authorizing, fragmenting, trespassing, skimming, filtering, pecking, filming, and imposing are all very real problems that people are faced with everyday. I found it interesting how he described them and what examples he inserted into the paragraph to get his points across. I myself have been guilty of “skimming” the text right before class, however, I have never been one to skim or peck through a novel that I am reading. Also, I cannot stand to watch a movie instead of reading the book or play and I believe that is just another way of cheating your way through life. Even though people say a “picture is worth a million words,” I feel as though the screen movies can never live up to a good old printed novel. As the author commented about the aesthetic pleasures of reading printed material, I completely and whole heartedly agree. I absolutely love curling up in front of my fireplace with a good book.

Besides the content of the essay, the author did very well setting it up; he made the structure extremely clear cut and nice flowing. He set up his essay so that it smoothly went from one subject to the next with very little confusion or puzzlement. The topics were easily discerned from one another with the excellent set up of the lengthy introduction that described what would be discussed. The essay was also very well researched and had a multitude of examples for all of the points that were made, along with a great section at the end that included his extra notes and citations. However, I do believe that he went off on a few too many tangents and a couple random anecdotes or stories that made his essay much harder to follow. It made the main points much harder to understand and extract from the essay. Even though he forewarned the hyper-reader about the many anecdotes included, it was still difficult to get my mind back on the topic that was previously being discussed. The author could have possibly cut back on his extra anecdotes, it made the essay incredibly wordy and not all that concise.

Even though I thought this essay to be a difficult and sometimes hard to follow read, I still enjoyed the challenge. I hope that in the future I will be better able to follow scholarly essays such as this one, and also that I will be able to better understand the deeper meanings that I had trouble finding in the Sosnoski essay.