Digital and print, reconsidered: how the reading platform affects our minds and hearts. From the article: 

But digital work, of course, spares few Americans. The sheer volume of emails, articles and DMs leads to a “defense strategy,” [Maryanne] Wolf said: skimming.

“You are missing words. You are missing clues. You are missing your ability to put your background information to work in the most productive way,” said Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Maybe that’s fine for a few texts with friends. But what about the most demanding parts of daily work? Many of the day’s most important tasks involve careful, sequential thinking — functions honed by what scholars call deep reading. Some, like Wolf, have worried that constant digital work threatens those cognitive processes.

“We have already begun to change how we read — with all of its many implications for how we think,” Wolf writes in “Reader, Come Home.”

The brain’s “reading circuit” is adaptive, Wolf writes. Processes that aren’t used can wither, and the circuit will adjust to the digital environment’s rapid-fire demands….

To others, the threat isn’t so dire.

Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads,” has argued digital work probably can’t drastically reshape our cognitive systems. But he agreed there are obvious shortfalls to digital reading.

A long strand of research has shown that reading comprehension is better on paper than on screens. The reasons are unclear, though researchers have some theories why. Study designs vary (and some find little difference in comprehension, depending on the conditions).

The divide depends on the type of reading, Willingham said.

“Informational” texts are harder to read on screen than “narrative” ones, according to a 2018 review of research by Spanish and Israeli scholars. Reading to memorize complicated facts or to gain a new skill is often easier on paper. Reading a novel for fun, on the other hand, is probably fine either way….

These rules of thumb are all about cultivating attention. “We are most productive when we can have insights that come into our work that allow us to go beyond just what’s in front of us,” Wolf said. “Deep reading provides that.”

For other posts on digital reading, see here.