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I own this book, but hadn't read it. Doh!

_http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html
_
(http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html)

I'm finding some things about silent reading by reading this, but here's
something interesting about reading aloud 1800 years ago:

-=-Punctuation, traditionally ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (circa
200 BC) and developed by other scholars of the Library of Alexandria, was at
best erratic. Augustine, like Cicero before him, would have had to practice a
text before reading it out loud, since sight-reading was in his day an
unusual skill and often led to errors of interpretation. The fourth- century
grammarian Servius criticized his colleague Donat for reading, in Virgil's Aeneid,
the words collectam ex llio pubem ("a people gathered from troy") instead of
collectam exilio pubem ("a people gathered for exile"). Such mistakes were
common when reading a continuous text.-=-

Because of punctuation, modern English is pretty easy to read aloud without
a whole lot of preparation. It wouldn't be cool to read cold for radio or
recordings, but it can happen that people can read a whole lot of cold text
without making a mistake, thanks to commas, quotation marks and periods.

It's a different skill, though, than "reading for meaning," silently to
oneself.

Still looking for clues...

Sandra


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