If you take the benefit of the doubt on the part of the author of the verbose sentence, then it could be that each of the abstractions in it is relevant. In tha

If you take the benefit of the doubt on the part of the author of the verbose sentence, then it could be that each of the abstractions in it is relevant. In that case, beginning with "People read" means you have to bring the reader around to the idea that it's relevant for contrasting individuals with collectives, social communities with non-social communities (?), and visual or symbolic types of learning with other types of learning. Basically what I'm saying is that starting point of "people read" actually might end up verbose enough that it's equally distracting. If those generalities are relevant to the study then the error of the original writer wasn't that she was too wordy, it's that she was too terse. Essentially it would have all these relevant concepts jammed into one sentence and it takes for granted that the reader is already comfortable working with these concepts. Of course this is not necessarily an error from the perspective of people in the field--this is all from the perspective of the author of the note.