That willingness to pause and probe is essential, but the dispositions of digital reading run otherwise. Fast skimming is the way of the screen. B

they have grooved for many years a reading habit that races through texts, as is the case with texting, e-mail, Twitter, and other exchanges, 18-year-olds will have difficulty suddenly downshifting when faced with a long modernist poem.

They are deep and semiconscious behaviors that are difficult to change except through the diligent exercise of other reading behaviors.

Texts like this one are too complex to allow for rapid exit and reentry. They often originate in faraway times and places and discuss ideas and realities entirely unfamiliar to the modern teenager. To comprehend what they say requires a suspension of present concerns.

Finally, the comprehension of complex texts depends on a receptive posture in readers. They have to finish the labor of understanding before they talk back, and complex texts delay the reaction for hours and days.

Digital communications, on the other hand, especially those in the Web 2.0 grain, encourage quick response.

Complex texts aren't so easily judged. Often they force adolescents to confront the inferiority of their learning, the narrowness of their experience, and they recoil when they should succumb.

reserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. One hour a day of slow reading with print matter, an occasional research assignment completed without Google—any such practices that slow down and intensify the reading of complex texts will help.