As you are reading this right now, are you taking the time to really digest what I am writing, or are you just skimming through the words because you don’t have the time? In Dwight Macdonald’s passage, “Reading and Thought”, he argues that in today’s society printed material results in “shallow thinking” and thus affects our writing material. His example, about a 16th century intellectual, proves that they would have taken their day to excogitate the reading material because they had the time to do so. Also, Macdonald mentions that he disagrees with Henry Luce’s idea of “functional curiosity” and believes that the only reward we receive out of reading this type of material is a practice in reading. When it comes to reading textbooks, online search engines or revealing title pages of magazines, readers don’t allow themselves to fully grasp what is being said to them. Today’s literature is inadequate and overwhelming because we simply don’t have the time to allow the…show more content… Like Macdonald mentions, we only read to gather information. Although I would complete the assignments, I would carefully “take in this, skim over that, and let the rest go by”. I would read or skim just to receive the information I needed. However, when it came time to write a report or essay on the reading material it was rather difficult because I didn’t fully comprehend what I had read or sometimes could not remember and because of this my writing matter had been affected for the worse. Because of all the new information I have taken in from different readings, I can barely remember the specific details mentioned in each of the novels. Given the abundance of literary work, there isn’t enough time to examine the work and analyze