Wednesday, February 5, was the 15th Annual World Read Aloud Day. Its creator, LitWorld, focuses mostly on the benefits of reading aloud to children. Good reasons for doing that reach far beyond language skills and a lifelong love of books.
The benefits of reading aloud for youth and adults get far less attention, but they’re real. I don’t mean just reading a witty or scandalous social media post or a short excerpt of an article. I mean reading entire essays, stories, even books aloud.
Granted, reading aloud can be bad manners—on a train, plane, or quiet library floor, or anywhere else we would disturb people to whom we’re not reading. And it’s slower. There’s not time to read all the books anyway. We’d compound that problem if we always read aloud.
But when we can read aloud, when we do, we invite several kinds of magic into life, beyond the internal magic of the story, poem, or essay itself, which we might encounter by reading silently.
Watching a film or TV show is, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, an exercise in passivity. By contrast, being read to requires us to engage our imaginations. Even more active is doing the reading ourselves, for our own benefit or others’. When we read aloud, we engage more of our brain, more muscles, and even our hearing. We force ourselves to slow down and interpret. All of this helps us to understand, feel, and remember.
Beautiful language can add great power to thoughts and stories. It’s often easier to detect and experience that beauty when reading it aloud.
The effort required to get a passage to sound the way we think it should, even if we succeed on our first try, can help us find deeper meanings, even multiple meanings, in what we read. It can give us greater insight into what the author was thinking, which enlarges our own understanding.
I propose an experiment in reading aloud. It can be a thought experiment if you wish, but there’s more adventure, among other things, in actually doing it.
Read one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets silently, then read it aloud. They’re only fourteen lines each. Work at reading it aloud until you start to feel the words, until you feel you’re getting it right.
If you want a suggestion, try Sonnet 66. It’s a bit dark. It begins, “Tired of all these, for restful death I cry.” To get it right, you’ll have to realize that “desert” in the second line, “As to behold desert a beggar born,” is related to deserve, not an expanse of sand. When the twelfth line moves you by its art and power—“And captive good attending captain ill”—you’re ready for the payoff in the last line. I won’t spoil it for you here.
When you as the audience are pleased with your performance as the reader, find someone else to be your audience. Don’t advertise the benefits to the listener’s heart, mind and soul. That might be off-putting. Just say you enjoy reading aloud and you’ve been practicing, and see what happens to both of you.
I don’t hear from a lot of readers of my own fiction—there aren’t multitudes of them to begin with—but one of my favorite things to hear is that couples enjoy reading my books aloud to each other. I heard that twice in the same month, a while back. One woman read them to her husband, who is mostly blind. Another couple took turns reading to each other as they drove across the continent and back.
As you see, reading aloud can be a shared social, cultural, and intellectual experience, as much for a couple or a group of friends as it was at Riverside Elementary, when my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Lofgreen, read aloud to us every afternoon.
Reading aloud has other uses too. As a writer I use it in several different ways, one of which is excruciating. We can chat about that some other time. I even read that reading aloud can help in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
But let’s get back to adults and youth reading aloud for the joy and power of it. Once you’ve truly fallen in love with words—which isn’t the same as falling in love with your own voice—or you’ve renewed that youthful romance, every day can be Read Aloud Day.
In case you’re in a mood to be read to, for World Read Aloud Day I recorded myself reading two of my shortest short stories and a brief excerpt from one of my novellas. It’s about twenty minutes of audio in all.
This column first appeared in the American Fork Citizen in February 2025. Reprinted by permission.
Image credit: ChatGPT
From the Author
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If you’re interested in my published fiction, check out my two published collections at 60 East Press.
