GP Question: Nowadays, the pleasures of reading can never compete with

the pleasures of visual entertainment. To what extent do you agree?

Clarification of Key Terms:
Nowadays: modern day context, 21st Century (inference: comparison to
the past encouraged)
pleasure: enjoyment, leisure, joy, intellectual stimulus
reading: books, magazines, newspapers, comics, periodicals etc.
visual entertainment: movies, television programmes, Internet media
(YouTube etc.), moving images (non-text)
never compete: impossible to contest/rival/challenge (absolute term)

pleasures of reading : feeling of excitement when story hits the climax,

de-stress, the feeling of learning something new

pleasures of visual entertainment: having ability to take on character

and manipulate the character in games, feeling excited when show hits
climax during movies or shows
Thesis/ Stand: The pleasures of reading can compete with the pleasures
of visual entertainment to a large/ small/ certain extent. (Choose!)
Arguments (Using content variable structure)
Reading CANNOT RIVAL pleasure from visual entertainment
o Reading CAN BE MORE pleasurable than visual entertainment
Both just as pleasurable

Lifestyle:

Modern city-living: hectic lifestyle

Reading may be text intensive, thus laborious, time consuming vs

seeing the entire story in a 3-hour movie/ 1-hour TV drama. E.g.
Dickens novels (500 pages or more) vs a movie adaptation.

Visual media such as online-gaming enhances the level of

interactivity, while reading is more passive.
o
Conventional print media may also be more convenient for the
mobile reader
Some readers have the sensorial preference for printed books (smell,
touch of the pages, the experiential pleasure of literature shopping
etc.)
Social

TV viewing or a movie outing often a social event that encourages

bonding, hence a popular form of leisure.
Humans are multi-dimensional, individuals derive enjoyment
possibly from both forms of entertainment, and hence the 2 media
are not mutually exclusive. The Internet (blogs, You-Tube, social
networking sites like Facebook and Twitter) encourages the use of
video uploads to compliment text, allowing more interactions and
total sensorial experience of the netizens. (Can be put into
conclusion / evaluation para)

Education

Language is a barrier (issue of literacy) vs picture paints a thousand

words
eg. medieval English, difficult to understand, not pleasurable to read.

Visual media concretises the abstract.

To aid academic learning, especially of abstract theories, visual
depiction helps in the understanding of the phenomenon e.g. HIV virus
spread in the body, the concept of how DNA splicing occurs.
o
Text allows readers to exercise creative imagination, emotional
connection.
Others
o
Certain genres of literature foster intimacy between reader and
writer e.g. biography may be lost when told via visual medium (e.g.
bad acting or weak plot development)
Many novels and short stories have been adapted into screenplays
and have achieved both box-office success and therein encouraging
the sales of the original books to be on national best-sellers list. E.g
Brokeback Mountain, Sense & Sensibilities etc. (Can be put into
conclusion)