Students Need to Read the Entire Book – Not Just Excerpts - Here's Why!

The act of reading an entire book – all the way through from beginning to end – is a hugely beneficial activity for students in elementary, junior high and high school.

Obviously, younger students can choose books that may be shorter and less difficult than high schoolers. Equally obvious, everyone should try for a high-interest book that has an engaging and interesting story.

But mainly, everyone should read the whole book – not just a chapter or an excerpt.

Reading the whole book lets a child see how characters and plot develop over time. The reader connects emotionally much more with the main character when reading the whole story. The reader picks up on concepts such as foreshadowing and point of view.

In addition, many studies now show that reading a whole book helps students improve memory and retention, adding cognitive advantages.

Reading a whole book also increases the pleasure of reading itself; this leads to more reading and even greater success.

It is well-known that students are reading less and less in our digital age. Less well-known is the complicity of the curriculum and educational establishment. Years ago, reluctant readers usually read at least two or three books per year as an assigned class novel in English class. This is no longer true.

Many teachers now choose a class novel for their class, but they assign each group (of 3-5 students) to read one chapter and then summarize it for the rest of the class!

In 2022 the National Council of Teachers of English announced that it would “open its doors to the digital world” more, de-emphasizing the primacy of the written word. The Council said that teachers should “challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master.”

In a 2025 column in the New York Times, high school teacher Tim Donahue wrote, “The notion that students can master a range of literary competencies is further diluting the already deluded approach to English class.

To put the National Council of Teachers of English guidelines in action, teachers are substituting intertextuality and experiential learning for engaging with the actual text.

What might have been a full reading of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.”

This is not the way to help your child or student to be a better reader. Instead, they need to find books of interest and read them all the way through. Having taught middle school for 28 years, I do have a list of high-interest books for middle schoolers, which I have shared on Beyond Words Learning.

And teachers – don’t look down your nose at the notion of reading a class novel together. Yes, students should read individual books of their own choice. However, if some of them never get around to it, at least they have read two or three books all the way through in your class, together with class discussions.

That’s better than reading zero books. And it’s way better than reading one chapter or a few soulless excerpts.