Writing and reading practices revisited – Lavinia Marin

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Writing and reading practices revisited

Aug 14, 2026

by

lavi

in academic writing

In my KU Leuven PhD thesis (revised and shortened, available as a book here, On the Possibility of a Digital University: Thinking and mediatic displacement at the university), I wrote about the discovery of writing and reading techniques in the Middle Ages as a revolution that changed how people think and use tools for that. I relied a lot on the work of Ivan Illich and his brilliant book on the 12th-century silent reading revolution, In the Vineyard of the Text. Thinking back now, I realise that my PhD discussion was partly guided by what I could only frame as economic logic: what is the gain or benefit of these new techniques of reading and writing? More thinking, hence more innovation! Very simply, writing indirectly leads to profit by generating gains in knowledge. I say I did this in my thesis "partially" because I had other chapters where I argued for the sheer joy and pleasure of thinking while speaking (in lectures and seminars), and that these should not be subject to any economic logic of teaching as knowledge transmission.

The silent reading revolution of the 12th century meant that people – scholars and monks mostly – learned to be more efficient with how they read a text: once they invented visual writing and reading, they could go straight to the passage that mattered to them, skim and skip lines of text, and use the glossary to search. This meant they could read more books in less time and accumulate knowledge. This led later to a kind of despair that Anne Blair talks about in her book Too much to know. Reading faster led to more writing, more publications, more stuff to know. Hence the despair.

I’ve recently come to regret the implicit economic framing I previously adopted when discussing writing and reading as practices for accumulating and growing the body of knowledge. Under our current late-stage capitalist logic, this has direct consequences that we are seeing now in our digital practices of reading and writing. Capitalism always pushes things to their extreme logic. If writing and reading practices foster innovation and wealth (via knowledge production, not direct gains…), then we should seek to optimise them and extract the best out of our practices. That’s the maximising logic. If reading and writing are good for thinking, can we make them better? "Hold my beer!" said the digital innovator.

This economic mindset/logic has now led us to abandon writing as a tool for thinking. Because it’s inefficient as hell. When I was doing my PhD at KU Leuven, I was at the same time learning to read and write anew, tailored for the academic world of Western Universities, which entails certain ways of thinking and approaching scholarship. And one of the things I learned, not from my instructors, but just from the environment, was that one should read like a pirate. Pirates plunder. They come, they loot, and they run away. Reading a text like a pirate means you don’t read it from beginning to end. No, that’s for beginners, innocent PhDs like I was who thought a text should be cherished. No. You are supposed to quickly look through the abstract, then go immediately to the section you’re interested in, harvest a few citations or points that would be useful for your own benefit, and then move on. This would be the economic logic of reading and writing, not as practices in themselves, but as this plundering – get what’s useful, discard the rest. Reading and writing in academia have already changed a lot, even before this type of advice emerged, a la reading like a pirate advice. For centuries now, academics and scholars have been immersed in a revolution to make our reading and writing practices as optimal as possible. Read like a pirate was just a joke-y way of putting it. But there was a trend.

Especially looking at the changes in the digital revolution, which put reading and writing on steroids because now you can search, you don’t even need to look with your eyes, you can search for the words in the text. It’s very instrumental how we read now, very efficient and targeted. I don’t even know the faces of these people I’m citing. I never did.

Illich, 1993, page 110.

Anything that has to do with research or knowledge accumulation has changed in the last century due to the digital revolution, meaning it has become even more economical. So if I were to push today the argument I did in my PhD that writing and reading are conducive to thinking, then this would be a losing argument, because actually thinking, innovation and knowledge can be done much faster by partially at least automating the process. Enter LLMs.

This is what large language models do, and that’s why they’re so hard to resist for many academics. The academic world is split: many in the humanities are completely against them, but many in computer science, hard sciences,...