What is reading?

This Study Section is all about reading. As you work through this section, you’ll be asked to read several pieces of work – articles from newspapers, magazines, books and so on (for convenience, we’ll refer to all of these as ‘texts’).

Writing is a form of communication. People write because they have some information that they want to communicate, and then we, as readers, look at the (typed or scripted) characters and words and make sense of the point the writer wanted to make.

Sounds quite simple, doesn’t it? Or does it? What is reading all about? What do we do when we read? Why bother to read anyway? Do we passively soak up information from the page, or do we actively question and consider the points we read?