16 December 2013

Reading: On-screen vs. on-paper

Technical journalists and translators are just professions out of thousands that are – should be – themselves about how well they read and reread on screen versus on paper.

An article entitled Does reading on screen beat paper? by Rhymer Rigby in the Working Smarter
section of the Financial Times dated 15 December 2013 discusses the issue quoting, among others, Anne Mangen, an associate professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, and Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in the US.

One factor makes generalisations both difficult and subject to rapid obsolescence is the subject's "history of screens – the more you have used them the more chance there is that you like them. Even so, studies suggest some 'digital natives' sometimes do better with paper."

Final quote, from Prof Wolf via the FT article: “My personal feeling is that paper is better for deep, focused reading, especially if you grew up with it”.

The good news is that reading specialists are working on the subject. 

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