Private English Tuition Bolton and Manchester: Why reading Dickens helps writing.

‘ Why is reading so important?’

This question needs a direct answer as it is one of the most important activities any human being, let alone ‘student’  can enjoy. Of course I can hear the moans straight away when I say the word ‘enjoy’ as so many students today simply do not read.

They do not want to read and they do not like reading! So there!

They may have  to read the ‘class reader’ at school  or feel forced to read GCSE texts, but these reading activities are regarded as a chore, taking up precious time better used they feel for something other than READING! What a waste of time reading is!

But of course I disagree. 

•  I know that reading helps us to escape from the daily details of this ‘life’ and to live other lives whist in this life!
• Reading gives our minds new arrangements of thoughts and ideas and sounds. These arrangements or patterns transport our brains into new places, with fresh people and different ways of relating to our lives and experiences.
• Reading allows us to EXPERIMENT with being alive, being alive to ourselves. How can we know much about ourselves with an impoverished set of tools. manufactured by the media for their own ends?
• This sounds elitist perhaps, but so be it. I do not have a problem with elitism, as every great thought and deed and discovery has emanated from minds with the capability of originality.
•  Minds who can think and think OTHERWISE from the ‘general’ opinion which is no real, INDIVIDUAL opinion at all.
• This short essay by Dickens revels in playful language and patterns. We wander through this part of London with Dickens, getting ‘past’ this place and that. Geography is a gallop, an adventure. We can hear the pace of the writer’s wanderings. The long sentence gives exhilarated, breathless expression to this exploration of the city.
• How important  is the repetition of the word ‘past’ for the whole impact of the opening?
• Once you have read this, it is imprinted upon your brain and at some point you may  use the technique yourself.  You have the resource because you have experienced the resource through READING!
• Reading makes us resourceful: it gives us OPTIONS in our communication and this gives us power.
• 

My day’s no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance’ sake, and had got past Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen’s Head (with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I don’t know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don’t know where; and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got past Whitechapel Church, and was–rather inappropriately for an Uncommercial Traveller–in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers’ shops where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards Wapping.