▶ Your Answer :
Assuming that visualizing concepts is the best approach in studying, some people argue that watching television increase their knowledge drastically. Some teachers, for example, often show a documentary to students because they believe the video can teach students effectively. People, however, acquire more knowledge by reading books because books provide greater details and enable people to annotate.
First, people are able to obtain more information in books because television offers simple, straightforward information whereas books provide very detailed pieces of information. For example, when I was 10th grade, I learned about Harper Lee's renowned novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In my English class, I was able to not only read the book but I also had a chance to watch a movie version of the book. In the book, all events were thoroughly organized, thus enabling me to understand the content deeply. On the other hand, in the movie, because all the content had to be fitted in one hour, many significant events were deleted and failed to give descriptive characteristics.
Because television often illustrates limited description, people definitely will gain depth by reading texts.
Moreover, books can be very beneficial because people can take notes in books. People tend to remember well when they actively learn the stuff. To be specific, psychologists proved that people can remember well when they encode learning meaningfully. In one experiment, participants were assigned to remember a word visually, audibly, and semantically. There were considerable differences in visual encoding and semantic encoding. When people memorized the word in context, they tend to put the word in a long-term memory. This result clearly demonstrates that reading books, which urge people to learn deeper meanings, teach people substantially.
In conclusion, gaining their information by texts is better than acquiring it by visual images. Some people still can get advantages by watching television. People have to discover appropriate ways of studying for them and more importantly, they actually should put their efforts in learning to make information on their own.
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