Empathy In Literature

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“Because books tell the stories of people we don’t know, places we haven’t been and worlds we can only imagine”, is a quote by Jarry Lee which explains it all about why we why should value studying literature. ADD THESIS The benefits of literature include the expansion of your own knowledge, improvement of communication skills, and to reduce stress. Literature can provide with you with the benefit to see the world from others’ experiences and perspective. This in turn, will help us to change our attitude on how we view the environment around us due to empathy. Empathy is the capacity of understanding someone else’s situation from their point of view. You put yourself into their place to recognize how they are feeling. Fiction provide you with…show more content…
It can make you empathize with what the characters in the novel which the facts can’t. For example, knowing what it’s like to save someone’s life or the feeling of being shell shocked while living in the trenches. By having empathy you can treat and respect other people they would want to be treated by you. Additionally, it will be easier for you to help and understand what the other individual is feeling if you have gone through a similar incident motivating you to assist that person. For example, if friend’s grandmother has just passed away, you would be able to relate yourself and provide empathy, since you have felt the pain when your loved one passes away. If you are empathetic, you are able to listen to each other and feel what the other is going through which can prevent conflicts. For example, I sometimes find myself arguing with another person, soon reminding…show more content…
Reading forces you to look at words that you haven’t seen before thus increasing the base of your terminologies. When I was younger, I wasn’t so good at spelling, grammar and punctuation but when I started to read books, I improved. Reading will make you more aware of character developments, plot outlines, sentence structure, and grammar. By reading literature, you are exposed to new writing styles which you could incorporate into your own texts. Studying literature provides you with new words and how those words can relate to other words. In result, your new vocabulary will aid you to speak more logically in various places. In the same way, actors learn from watching various dramas, and artists using methods created in the past, writers can also acquire information on how to write better by reading books created by other authors. In the same way that musicians influence one another, and painters use techniques established by previous masters, so do writers learn how to craft prose by reading the works of
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