Slow Down and Read

Slow Down and Read

One of the difficulties in using the rich abundance of theological literature that has now been digitised and is available through the internetarchive.org and other sites is that sometimes the OCR is less than perfect.  Computer software is not as good as the human brain in interpreting archaic text.  Indeed, sometimes it is totally useless and the text is more or less unreadable.  In that case I abandon my mobi (kindle) text and resort to the pdf images.  It is less useful, cannot be searched or cannot be cut and pasted as text, but it is readable.

 

More often the OCR is simply “dodgy” and with a little perseverance can be read reasonably well.  What it does do is make me slow down and read rather than scan the text.  By doing so I take more in and think more carefully about what I read.  I used to have a poster in my class room in which a paragraph of text was jumbled up, but the first and last letters of each word were in the correct place:

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

What amazed me was not how many pupils could read the text, but how many of our pupils with dyslexia could reads it!  Pupils were also intrigued that teachers could read text upside down, or at least I could, which was very useful in surveying their ongoing work.  (Try it; it comes with little practice.).  Research also shows that a blurred or greyed text is perfectly readable and that it again makes you slow down and think as you read.

Slowing down to read any text is of benefit; slowing down to read Scripture is of enormous benefit. We sometimes speed read our bibles as if more is better and quicker is commendable. I sometimes feed documents into a Spritz reader, (http://spritzinc.com/ ), and there can be a place for this when large amounts of text have to be digested quickly.  I was not surprised to find that there is a smart phone app that uses the technology to read the bible, “ BibleGist – Spritz the Bible”. I do not think this is how the bible should be read.  Nor do I think that listening to the bible text at x1.5 or x2 speed is what should be done.

Rev. John T. Carson, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, once stayed with us on Arran.  He shared that for his devotional reading of Scripture he used Scripture Union notes, but the French language version.  This had come about by accident when he was visiting in Canada and needed new notes but only the French language version was available.  He found that using the French S.U. notes slowed him down, made him think more about what he was reading and developed a deeper devotional interaction with Scripture.

I am not advocating that we necessarily read our Bibles in a foreign language, read them through the medium of bad OCR or read the text upside down.  What I am advocating is that we slow down, think, pray, and meditate as we read Scripture. Equally, when we are reading theological literature we should slow down and digest what we are reading.  We may not get through as much,  but what we read will be of more benefit to us.