Honorable teachers and fellow students, please allow me to begin my speech on the given topic that is reading- an emerging trend or a dying interest.
I would like to begin my speech with a quote from a book, Shadow of the Wind which goes like; “...that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day..."
And I am inclined to agree. Reading has been seriously endangered by the new emerging world of multimedia. Most people rely on everything that they can find on their computers online. Many forms of recreation and leisure are now available to us that we are straying from the old hobbies such as reading. It truly saddens me. Reading, in my opinion is a habit that evolves during childhood. In this age of television, reading books is not as important as it once was. With the advent of so many channels on tv, children do not give much importance to reading. . Well, reading is like a hobby that one has to cultivate from an early age in life.
Nowadays nobody wants to learn any language thoroughly. You can learn the language that you use for speaking directly from listening to radio or watching TV. But in order to learn the correct grammar of a language, one must sit back and read magazines and books with a good amount of concentration.

Let’s start by weighing the advantages of possessing good reading habits. For starters, it improves our speed of reading which is vital to many students as most competitive exams are for a span of 3 hours and having a really good speed of reading helps us like more than anything else.

Being an avid reader another thing I have felt is that reading stretches one’s imagination. And reading inspires you to think like the writer and try to guess what comes next in the novel.

Another aspect of reading is vocabulary improvement. We come across many words which we do not use in our day-to-day life in books. Having a good vocabulary is always an added advantage.

Reading as a hobby should never die. In this age of computers and television we rarely see people sitting and reading except for while traveling long hours in a bus or train.
So I plea to everyone to take up reading and inculcate in people you know so that we can enjoy the pleasures of reading.
Thank you!