Claim A: "Reading still plays...a crucial role in our society."
Warrant 1A: Reading is "the activity through which most of us learned much of what we know of the wider world."Warrant 2A: Reading has "established our patterns of thought and, in an important sense, made our civilization."
Warrant 3A: Reading helps develop "psychic habit, a logic, a sense of complexity, an ability to spot contradictions and even falsity."
Warrant 4A: Fiction and general-interest nonfiction authors often use books to pursue movie contracts or tenure positions at unviersities.
Warrant 5A: They give books as gifts and replaced "the bottle of Scotch or the tie."
Evidence #1: "The number of bookstores in the United States has been growing in recent decades..."
Evidence #2: "...more than one quarter of all their sales are in November and December -- for the holidays."
Warrant 6A: "If education still stimulated the desire to read, all the statistics on reading would be shooting up."
Warrant 7A: "Reading is central to our culture," states Ong, a professor of humanities at Saint Louis University.
Evidence #1: "It is connected to virtually all the forces that shaped our culture."
Warrant 8A: "The decline in SAT scores has a lot to do with not reading," asserts College Board President Donald M. Stewart.
Evidence #1: "The ability to read is linked to the ability to process, analyze and comprehend information."
Rebuttal (Claim A): "...the logic inculcated by writing and print is not the only way of processing information about the world."
Evidence #1: "...electronic forms of communication might lead to different but equally valid ways of being smart..."Evidence #2: "These media might be capable, given time, of creating a culture as profound and deep as that of reading."
Counterargument Evidence #1: "It took 2,000 years of writing before an alphabet was developed. It took a century and a half of printing before someone thought to print a novel or a newspaper."
Claim B: "...reading's role has diminished and likely will continue to shrink."
Warrant 1B: Reading has "begun fading from our culture at the very moment that its importance to that culture is finally being established."Warrant 2B: "A mode of thinking is being lost," laments Neil Postman
Evidence #1: Decline involvements in cultural activities and politics, as well as our children's SAT scores spiriling down.
Warrant 3B: "...reading is in decline..."
Evidence #1: (Daniel Boorstin, a historian and former librarian of Congress) "I'm careful not to embarrass my dinner companions by asking what they have read lately."
Warrant 4B: "The fact is that few of us...have the time to read as much as we would like."
Evidence #1: "We're too busy working or working out or playing or...watching TV."
Warrant 5B: "Our homes barely make room for reading."
Evidence #1: We don't have libraries, studies or dens; we have "family rooms" or "television rooms."
Evidence #2: We've replaced books with "flat screens and Nintendos."
Evidence #3: We've replaced bookshelves with "entertainment centers."
Warrant 6B: "According to the Gallup Poll, the number of Americans who admitted to having read no books during the past year...doubled from 1978 to 1990, from 8% to 16%."
Warrant 7B: "What has changed is the strength of the habit of reading a newspaper," notes Al Gollin of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.
Evidence #1: "According to the University of Maryland time-use studies, the share of the adult population that "read a newspaper yesterday" has declined from 85% in 1946 to 73% in 1965 to 55% in 1985."
Warrant 8B: (Daniel Kevles, professor of humanitites at Caltech) "We are developing a generation that has no interest in reading except insofar as it is assigned in school."
Evidence #1: "A recent Times Mirror survey found that only 30% of Americans under the age of 35 said they had read a newspaper the previous day, compared to 67% in 1965."
Evidence #2: "According to a survey by Birch/Scarborough, a grand total of 8.9% of us said we kept up with war news primarily through newspapers."
Evidence #3: "...the total time people spent with reading (including newspapers) as their primary activity has dropped more than 30% in those years, from 4.2 hours a week to 2.8."
Warrant 9B: "Our society is particularly ingenious at thinking up alternatives to the book," notes Boorstin.
Evidence #1: The creations of movies, recordings, radio, telephones, computers, photocopiers and fax machines.
Evidence #2: "But, of course, the most powerful product of this revolution, so far, and the one that has posed the largest threat to reading, has been television."
Evidence #3: "The first television wave washed over us in the 1950s and '60s."
Evidence #3: "In 1982, only 5.5% of American homes had videocassette recorders. Now (1990) 72.5% of them do..."
Evidence #4: "...according to the Gallup Poll, 61% of us proclaim reading "more rewarding" than watching television; 73% lament that we read too few books; 92% attest that reading is a "good use" of our time. And 45% of the poll's respondents believe, against all the evidence, that they will be "reading more in the months and years ahead."
Warrant 10B: "Reading certainly is well loved now that it is in decline."
Evidence #1: "...reading, like eating broccoli, has now become something that we feel we should do..."
Rebuttal (Claim B): "the widespread notion that (reading) it is in decline is an oversimplification."
Evidence #1: "...people who used to read a lot of books read less now."Evidence #2: "...there are many more people reading books."
Evidence #3: "...133,196 new titles listed in Books in Print in (1990). That is about 16 times the number of titles printed 40 years ago."
Evidence #4: Publishers sold "about 2 billion books in 1990, an 11% increase over 1985."
Evidence #5: "A recent Gallup Poll found many more people in 1990 than in 1957 who say they are currently reading a book or novel..."
Counterargument Evidence #1: "...many fewer [people] (in 1991) than in 1975 (said) they (had) completed a book in the past week."
Counterargument Evidence #2: "...books are often purchased to be consulted, not read. About 15% of the new titles in "Books in Print" are scientific or technical books."
Rebuttal (Claim B): (Library Research Center at the Univesrity of Illinois) "Public-library circulation in the United States has grown from 4.7 "units" per capita per year in 1980 to 6.1 in 1989."
Counterargument Evidence: "...the "units" we are checking out of the library now include not only lots of school and business readings but also cassettes, CDs and videotapes."
