7 Legit Reasons Why Reading Fiction isn’t a Waste of Time – MyReadingWorld (2023)

FAQs

Why reading fiction is not a waste of time? ›

Reading fiction is a great way to pass the time

Reading fiction can get you engaged in some pretty amazing stories, can make you daydream about better times or amazing events, and can make time fly. That is exactly what we need from time to time, and that is perfectly fine for our mental health.

Recent research in neuroscience suggests that you might look to the library for solutions; reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy, theory of mind, and critical thinking. When we read, we hone and strengthen several different cognitive muscles, so to speak, that are the root of the EQ.

Fiction helps you understand other people's perspectives

It is a meld between the mind of the reader and the writer, and the minds of reader and character. When you read fiction, you're seeing the world through a character's eyes. Watching a character interact with the world around them is powerful.

Reading improves memory and cognitive ability — which means it's a healthy habit that can help kids in and outside the classroom. Along with that improved brain power comes an improved vocabulary.

Reading fiction provides mental stimulation which helps with memory, vocabulary, and focus. When reading, we put ourselves into the mind of the characters. This can help develop empathy and emotional intelligence.

The experience of gaining access to the interiority of the characters' minds can broaden our perspective and more accepting of diversity. Sometimes, people get so engrossed with the characters that their own personalities get affected. The extent may vary, but fiction creeps into the daily existence for many of us.

Reading fiction books to learn English is one of the most effective ways to improve your language skills because fiction books are the most enjoyable things to read! English story books help to extend your vocabulary in a “natural way” by entertaining you and engaging your mind in ways that many English classes can't.

Engaging with fantasy can stimulate creativity and boost vocabulary. It may help some children develop better self-regulation skills. It might even enhance their working memory performance, and — under some conditions — help them discover creative solutions to problems.

Reading fiction helps make us human. Literature connects us to and deepens our understanding of other people—their needs, desires, and motivations. It helps us get in touch with our own feelings. It introduces us to people and places we would not otherwise know.

Why is fiction better than nonfiction essay? ›

Reading fiction makes us more empathetic.

Studies indicate that the better and more captivating the story, the more effective it is at changing assumptions and challenging stereotypes. In fact, research shows that fiction is more effective than nonfiction at changing our views about people different from ourselves.

Character is perhaps the most important element of fiction, as things must happen to someone or something in order for a story to progress. Not only is this crucial for story development, but as human beings, we read stories and enjoy stories because we can see ourselves in them, often through the characters.

Even after we know the facts, we continue to search for sense and meaning. That is at the essence of our humanity. The historical novelist exposes the reader to the inner lives of people across time and place, and in doing so illuminates history's untold stories, allowing the reader to experience a more complex truth.

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.

Our genes make play, and therefore reading fiction, enjoyable because they help us be interactive and manage our emotions. We do what we're good at, and we're naturally good at considering the perspectives of others and getting inside a new role.

A Good Read

Kidd and Castano (p. 377, published online 3 October) provide experimental evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, in comparison to nonfiction or popular fiction, does indeed enhance the reader's performance on theory of mind tasks.

The politics of fiction

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

Reading fiction can spur growth and self-development. Exiting our self-narratives and simulating others' mental states is behind the mechanism of fiction's transformational powers. Reading fiction can help increase cognitive empathy and teach us about ourselves.

Reading Fiction Enhances Our Imagination

By taking us into another world, it opens our minds to new ideas and possibilities that definitely help us experience and analyze the world through others' lives. This practice strengthens our mind and helps us in understanding new things.

Can reading fiction make us more human? ›

At the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab, psychologist Diana Tamir has demonstrated that people who often read fiction have better social cognition. In other words, they're more skilled at working out what other people are thinking and feeling.

Fiction is any narrative which does not contain facts or real events, rather it is based on imagination.

A workout for a part of the brain tied to empathy. People who read a lot of fiction are known to have stronger social skills than nonfiction readers or nonreaders.

All the research says reading a book is good for you. Better even than listening to an audiobook or reading one on an e-reader. It reduces stress, promotes comprehension and imagination, alleviates depression, helps you sleep and may contribute to preventing Alzheimer's. Reading is active; watching TV is passive.

Children who read books regularly are known to have better concentration, memory retention, and analytical skills. Reading fiction helps ease the anxieties children commonly experience facing important events in their lives, whether it's starting school, going on a first date, or approaching school tests.

Even realism is a constructed and imagined representation of reality, not reality per se. Fantasy just happens to be a more exaggerated departure from reality. One of the most obvious benefits of fantasy is that it allows readers to experiment with different ways of seeing the world.

Writers love the freedom the genre gives them to explore themes and ideas. Readers love the sense of wonder, and the assurance that one small person can make a difference. As Kate Forsyth says: “Fantasy fiction does not deny or diminish the existence of sorrow and pain, as so many people seem to think.

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing.

A lot of prior work has found that people who read fiction — any fiction, not just the literary kind — tend to be more empathetic, meaning they're better able to understand and share what others are feeling. Some of this empathy work has documented a cause-and-effect relationship between reading and empathy.

Why do humans like stories so much? ›

Stories work because they engage our emotions, leaving us open to suggestion. They've been used as a way of sharing information since childhood, by entertaining our minds and making us feel (whether it be positive or negative emotions).

The five Ws (what, when, where, why, who) plus an H (how) strategy can be used in a variety of ways. It is often used to help students summarise an article they read.

The purpose of reading is to connect the ideas on the page to what you already know. If you don't know anything about a subject, then pouring words of text into your mind is like pouring water into your hand.

However, research has shown that young children often prefer nonfiction over fictional books. * This may be because children are still learning about the world around them and facts and stories about real-life topics are new and exciting!

While the fiction engages the imagination and demands present-state attention. Fiction pose us with hypothetical questions and explores us with potential consequences. But this is not possible with a nonfiction book. Nonfiction books give us facts, information while the fictional books develop our ability to think.

There are five main elements of fiction to be found in (nearly) every piece of fiction: plot, setting characters, narrative perspective, and theme. Plot is the sequence of events and their relationship in a story. Setting is the time and place in which the events of a literary work occur.

The three most important elements of fiction are character, plot, and setting. We can call this the first tier of elements. These elements are essential to fiction—a story without any one of these three is not a story.

Reading historical fiction gives you understanding of the past, clarity in the present, and foreknowledge of the future. It takes you to different eras and different places. You get to know thousands of characters. It's knowledge, but it's also just plain FUN!

Rereading is necessary to build a greater understanding of a text than can be accomplished on a first reading. Without rereading, it may be impossible to appreciate a writer's more subtle talents or to comprehend a text's intricate ideas and themes.

Why is reading non fiction beneficial? ›

Make real-world connections. Since nonfiction books share facts or real-life events, they are great tools for making real-world connections to build on children's knowledge and personal experiences. This also means that you can use nonfiction books to further enhance children's experiences and interests.

Reading challenges our minds and sparks our creativity. It makes us see things in our "mind's eye" rather than simply interpreting someone else's vision.

When reading books, we get more knowledge and it helps us improve our vocabulary. Characters are described much better and with more detail. One important thing that books do have and movies don't is that they provide more background information than a movie does.

Rereading books strengthens an understanding of the pattern, rhythm and pronunciation of the text. Developing a deeper understanding of phonemic awareness involves identifying, hearing and manipulating separate sounds in words, an important early stage of learning to read.

The Books Themselves

Depending on when the book was published, the paper, ink and binding material could all deteriorate or corrode over time. Paper is vulnerable to chemical reactions during the ageing process and leather bindings are vulnerable to damage if they get too damp or frozen.

Stop reading boring books. Unless you absolutely need to finish reading a book for a class, position or job, you're probably better off putting down books you don't enjoy. I've found good books are like good food, the more you enjoy it, the faster you want to ingest it.

Furthermore, according to research reported on by NPR, not only are children “significantly more likely to prefer fact over fiction,” but they are also more likely to select true stories over fantasy than are adults.

Everybody knows that reading nonfiction books can help them become more determined and build a better routine. And this revamped lifestyle will reduce their stress levels — and in a broader sense — their anxiety. As such, reading nonfiction is a well-established weapon against anxiety and procrastination.

Even though you will not lose your eyesight or damage it in any way through doing too much reading, you can cause some eye strain if your reading sessions run for too long. The symptoms are quite easy to identify: your eyes may be itchy, watering, or you might even get blurry vision.

Reading for a long time or “too much” reading can actually be harmful to you. There are several health damages- both mental and physical that can happen if you read a lot. When you read too much, you become lazy, slow, drained, and exhausted both physically and mentally.

Is reading too much a disorder? ›

Bibliomania is not a psychological disorder recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in its DSM-IV. Bibliomaniacs are characterized as those who are obsessed with books so much so that they will go to extreme measures to obtain the books they want.

Reading has a positive effect on our mental health, while watching TV has the exact opposite effect. Reading can reduce stress, lower our blood pressure, our heart rate and muscle tension. On top of the knowledge boost reading provides us with, it also has a healing effect on our mental state.

When you read a book, you can interpret the plot and the story to your liking. Books allow your mind to be creative. Furthermore, books are much more detailed than films. Usually a film lasts approximately two hours while in a book there can be hundreds (maybe thousands) of pages of description.

But books give you more: They boost your imagination, creativity, thinking skills. They exercise more parts of your brain – you're making your brain better in many ways.