The document summarizes key points from Thomas Newkirk's book "The Art of Slow Reading" which advocates for slowing down the reading process. It discusses how slow reading fosters a deeper relationship with the text and author by carefully attending to language, visualizing scenes, and questioning ideas. It also addresses challenges to slow reading like testing pressures and distractions that encourage speeding over comprehension. Overall, the document provides an overview of Newkirk's perspective on slow reading techniques like memorization, annotation, and reflection that allow readers to fully engage with a text.

1. “To read slowly is to maintain an
intimate relationship with a writer. If we
are to respond to a writer, we must be
responsible. We commit ourselves to
follow the unfolding of an idea, to hear
a text, to attend to language, to
question, to visualize scenes. It means
paying attention to the decisions a
writer makes.” Newkirk, 2012
The Art of Slow Reading
By: Thomas Newkirk
LS 5160
Rachel Campbell, Whitney Dittman, and
Christine Schmitt

2. Chapter One: About Slowness
• The Flow to Slow Reading: Periods when we are
immersed in the narrative flow, and times when we
pause to reflect or reread or just savor the moment.
• Slow Reading is Essential: For real comprehension,
crucial to the deep pleasure we take in reading and for
the power of reading to change us.
• Reading Is: An intense relationship with a writer.
Together, with the author, enacting the story; a
partnership. Texts do not have main ideas, you
determine them through your own pattern of attention.

3. Chapter One.…
• Connection and Collaboration: All good writing is
told by a teller, a narrator, a guide.
• Age of Distraction: The difficulty we all experience
of being present in our own lives. In this age of
multitasking, floating from website to website, we
lose full, sustained acts of attention. They become
difficult to perform. The concentration needed to
read becomes harder to maintain.
• What Can Help Students?
**Bringing Back Older Practices of Reading**
Memorization, Annotation, Mediation, Performance
• Why? Older Practices have relevance today in
classrooms; this is where we are present in our
reading, in class.

4. Chapter One…
• Part of Our Culture: Reading and writing are
cultural practices, not just technical proficiencies.
They are embedded in rituals, cultures, institutions,
and histories; all of which provide us with another
important kind of knowledge.
• Why Read and Write?: We learn to read and write
in order to participate in cultures and communities,
to connect with others, to enter the mysteries of
religious experience, to do the work of the world, to
share responses to literature, and to sometimes
literally pledge allegiance to institutions.

5. Chapter Two: The Speed
Curriculum
• The Mix of Reading Programs and Testing: There is a large mix
of reading programs and assessment in multiple school districts
that clutter and contend in their schools, making the day
increasingly hectic; focus on measurement and speed; the push for
performance and pacing.
• Fluency Is: An attunement to the text, an act of attentiveness, an
alertness to mood, voice, punctuation and sensuousness of
language.
• Wrong Impression: You will not be a more fluent reader if you
read faster. Fluency tests tell a dangerous story about reading and
learning to young children: that speed is key, that reading is a race,
that the stopwatch rules. Fluency can mean slowing down as well.
• Slow Down: Even for basic comprehension, we often have to slow
down and imagine a text as performed; we might be able to read all
the words, but miss the purpose or action of those words.

6. Chapter Two…
• Testing: Students need to take their time, concentrate, and
make sure that the answers they are giving are their absolute
final decisions. Time constraints should be eliminated at any
level. This gives individuals the time to accurately and
successful complete all their work.
• The Clock in the Mind: Everyone has a “natural” internal
clock.
• Teacher Clocks:
– We are often in two places at the same time. We are attending to
what students are saying, doing, hopefully learning, but we are
also attending to the clock in our heads.
– This can effect us from being effective listeners or observers
because we are not fully present in our own classrooms.
Teachers have an acute sensitivity to the passage of time. But
sometimes this may slip when we are deeply engaged and
emerged into a more clock-conscious state of mind.

7. Chapter Two…
• Teacher Clocks Continued:
– We want our students to be fully engaged at all times;
this holds us accountable as teachers for the lack of
full engagement.
– We are an “assembly line.” There is no opportunity to
question the pacing guides, to argue that students
need more time. The pace of instruction becomes a
fact of nature.
– Even when we are not on the clock, it is so easy to
rush ourselves, and the proliferation of educational
goals and expectations is a big part of the problem.
– Teaching requires the discipline to say “Yes” to a few
of things, and “No” to most things. Otherwise, our
efforts are scattered and superficial.

8. Chapter Two…
• The Culture of Distraction:
– Parents appreciate the regularities of school.
– Reading is becoming a “power browse;” a form of
skimming activity that involves hopping from one
source to another.
– Multiple information sources solicit readers’ attention.
• The Pleasures of Scarcity: We can reclaim
resourceful modes of reading, born in times of scarcity.
We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote
ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear
the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences,
experience the pleasure of words.

9. Six Practices
• Performing: Attending to the texts as dramatic, as enacted for an
audience. Special attention is paid to acoustic and emotional
qualities of language: emphasis, pace, voice of narrator, and
characters.
• Memorizing: Learning “by heart.” Retaining word-for-word
memories of passages that serve as frames for perceiving
experience.
• Centering: Assigning significance to a part of text, often literally
making a mark to indicate an act of attention.
• Problem Finding: Interrupting the flow of reading to note a problem
or confusion, and then adopting strategies to deal with the problem.
• Reading Like a Writer: Attending to the decisions a writer make’s.
Mentor texts, considering alternatives, and revisions.
• Elaborating: Developing the capacity to comment and expand
upon texts: “Opening a text.”

10. Chapter Three: Reading Goes
Silent
Performing
• The Reader: The “oral” reader is a performer.
• Sound Cues: Enables readers to connect, to
imagine, the presence of the writer, a quality
writers often refer to as voice.
• Reading is: Reading is more than just
comprehension. It is a full response that requires
sensitivity to the acoustical properties of language.
• Silent Reading: Lets the reader establish an
unrestricted relationship with the book and the
words.
• Three Kinds of Readers:
Motor, Auditory, and Visual

11. Chapter Three…
• Reading Aloud to Students: Teachers can model
how good writing can sound. It helps students
internalize a voice for the text.
• Strategies For Reading Aloud:
– Find your own favorites
– Scoring the text
– Use reading aloud to begin a class
– Reading aloud as part of book talks
– Read beginnings aloud
– Reading aloud to highlight the reading done in a
course
– Reading as a symphony of lines

12. • During the late 19th century and well into the 20th
century, memorization was popular within schools.
• Poems were especially popular. They told stories,
they rhymed, and they were instantly
comprehensible.
• They were later rejected because of their
inaccuracy and false nostalgia.
• Now we see them as a connection with
community.
Poetry
Chapter Four: Making a Mark

13. • Poetry was popular well into the 20th century.
“Listen my children and you shall hear…”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“To be, or not to be…”
William Shakespeare
“We, the people, in order…”
The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America
Chapter Four: Learning by heart
memorization and slow reading

14. “Listen my children and
you shall hear...”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“To be, or not to be…”
William Shakespeare
“We, the people, in
order…”
The Preamble to the Constitution
of the United States of America
• Most of us have
passages in our
memory that we don’t
realize until an
occasion arises.
Newkirk says that,
“By engaging in the
intimacy of
memorization, we pay
attention in a powerful
way.”
Memorization at its best

15. • Socrates’ character, Thamus, was very
critical of the character, Theuth, who invented
writing. Thamus said writing would produce
forgetfulness. There would be no reason to
use memory when men would trust writing,
“external characters which are no part of
themselves…” (In Bizzell and Herzberg,165)
• Newkirk says writing did not do away with
memory, but the reading of that writing
depends on prior knowledge to achieve
reading comprehension.
Writing and Memory

16. Adages are sayings meant to carry meaning that will
“guide to action.”
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you
can do for your country.”
This inaugural address coincided with the creation of the
Peace Corps.
Adages- The People’s Poetry and
Philosophy

17. Helps students retain language that captures a theme or
style of a writer:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities
Comedy- students find jokes easy to remember and
understand:
“What kind of books do skunks read?”--- “Best-smellers”
Canonical Sentences:
Famous lines from Literature

18. • Newkirk says we can determine for ourselves the “all important” main idea. We
can notice things and discuss among ourselves. In this way, “the text becomes
richer and fuller.”
• Pulled Quotes: Quotes from students’ reading that exemplify an authors style,
voice, [or] point of view. These can be copied, laminated and placed around the
room. These can serve as inspiration and motivation.
• “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth
your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish
childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”- Angela’s
Ashes by Frank McCourt
• Expectation: Pay attention to beginnings. When we read beginnings slowly, we
discover what kind of reader we will need to be for that particular thing. There
needs to be expectation in order to have comprehension…even a wrong
expectation is more helpful than nothing.
Chapter Five: Making a Mark

19. • “Embarrassment is the great enemy of learning.”
• Struggling readers perceive their difficulties as internal, especially
when others do not struggle. The teacher is well prepared so it
appears as though the teacher never struggles with new material.
• One idea would be to present material new to everyone and
examine it together. In this way the process is more transparent,
with everyone struggling together: Poetry can be especially
challenging.
– Four farms over it looked like a braid of black hemp. Does the author mean
above, or across?
• Successful learners realize they can fail without being failures. They
learn from their mistakes, but don’t dwell on them.
Chapter Six: The Pleasures of
Difficulty

20. Chapter Seven: A Writer’s Choice
• HOW to read like a writer
– Read word by work
– Read sentence by sentence
– Ponder each decision that the writer made
– Recall inspiration and instruction
– Find beauty and pleasure in the art of writing and
reading
– Understand the usage of the mechanics
• Spelling, punctuation, usage

21. Chapter Seven…
Reading and Writing:
• Three kinds of deliberate close reading:
– Annotation
• Attending to surprise and effective authorial choices
– Selective Destruction
• Degrading an effective text to appreciate skillful choices
– Revision
• Improving writing and studying the revisions of other authors
• (Newkirk 144)

22. Chapter Seven…Annotation
• Mark up the selection
• Write a summary paragraph
telling what was liked about the
selection
• Focus on some of these reading
questions: (Newkrik 146)
– See scans
Wrecking a Text
• Highlights choices that the
authors make
• Displayed in read-alouds
• Raise questions about author
choices
• Cloze procedure
– Using knowledge of context
and syntax and guessing the
meaning of the word
– Transforms the passage
Wrecking Punctuation
• Play safe with punctuation -
periods, commons, colons,
semicolons, dash, parentheses
• Sometimes punctuation can be a
trap for students as it is used to
often where unnecessary
Revision: editing the writing
• Editing tips:
Eliminate ten words that are
unnecessary
Find one sentence that can be
improved and change it
Find five word choices that could
be improved and write in the
better choice
(Newkirk 158).

23. Chapter Seven…
Focus on these reading questions
when understanding a writing. This will
help the reader become more involved
with the text and understand more of
the choices the author has made
(Newkirk 146,147).

24. Chapter Eight: Opening a Text
• Reading can embody the spirit of writing.
• Text can activate digression, meditation, and reflection.
• We read to comprehend and to understand the writer within the
text.
• How to elaborate your writing to make it stronger for the reader:
– Add details that may have been left out
– Add dialogue
– Add internal reactions and thoughts of individuals
– Find someone who can question your point or position
– Find new evidence
– Make connections to other things you have read or
experienced
– Develop the point of the writing

25. Chapter Eight…
• Elaborating:
QUOTATIONS
• Added for…
– Personal reasons
– Technical tasks
– Arguments
– To give solidity to
points the writer is
making
• Elaborating: THE ART OF
ATTENTION
• Scripted Reading (Newkirk 188)
– Work with small units
• Explore in depth with smaller units
– Adopt a trusting attitude
• Something can emerge from reading
• Trust the text
– Entering a state of mindfulness
• Enter into a slowed down space,
meditative space, a thoughtful space
– Attend to word meaning
• Write down words that seem
strange, engaging, puzzling
• Form study groups with the text to
understand words
– Read with the full body
• Engage all the senses when reading

26. Chapter Eight…
• “It is an act of deep affection and
respect. We typically “quote up” and
include the exact words of other
writers who make points better,
more eloquently, more
authoritatively than we do” (Newkirk
181).

27. Why can’t they be like we were,
perfect in every way?
• Explore the possibility of new media
when writing and reading
• Slowing down can give readers power
• Having a slower pace can allow time for
rereading and reflection
• Read for pleasure and meaning
• Focus on the meaning and sound of the
words

28. Why can’t they be like we were,
perfect in every way?
“We need to put away the stopwatch and say in
every way possible –
‘this is NOT a race.
Take your TIME.
PAY attention.
TOUCH the words and
tell me how they touch YOU’” (Newkirk 197).

29. Works Cited…
• Newkirk, T. (2012). The art of slow
reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• http://www.schooltube.com/video/03f9c858
260a4da9b582/School-House-Rock-The-
Preamble