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I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new. I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page em

• hellisothers 1y ago
  > Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words Is this tru’ish? I’m not refuting it I’m just a little shocked this might be the situation we’re in. I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story?
  • bombcar 1y ago
    It’s probably true insofar as if random assholes accost me and ask to read a page from a book I’m more likely to employ old Anglo Saxon than engage with their stupidity.
  • watwut 1y ago
    A weirdo approaches you with a highly unusual request. You suspect the goal is to humiliate you or make you into a dummy somehow, which is actually their goal. No thanks. > I know generally people now struggle to consume long form content but it even being able to read a story? There is reading and then there is reading an unknown text out loud in public while being judged. The two are not the same thing. I had to read publicly when I was a student years ago when smartphones were a new thing. They handed me the text with instructions to reread it at least twice ideally out loud before performing. The point is, it is not like 20 years ago a good student would be expected to read super fluidly out loud in public without at least a little preparation.
    • smeej 1y ago
      Way to miss the forest for the trees. "The grocery store" is just "a place people from a wide variety of backgrounds have to go to." Nobody's talking about actually accosting people to give them tests. The point is that everyday people would struggle with this task if they weren't specifically prepared for it.
  • footy 1y ago
    I read like 80 books in a slow year but if someone approached me at the grocery store and asked me to read even a children's book I would refuse. It's not because I can't read, it's because when I'm at the grocery store I am kind of busy getting my groceries and don't want to engage with a stranger who has an odd request. That stranger might conclude I can't read, when in reality I devour books, am the beta reader for my two published-author friends, and probably edit the "thoughts on books I've read" section of my personal wiki more than any other.
• deleted 1y ago
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• KittenInABox 1y ago
  I don't want to correlate the ability to read aloud to a stranger about the same as parsing. It's possible to read and not parse what you're saying (that's what teleprompters are for) and its possible to parse and not speak. Do we have formal studies for comprehension?
• rizzom5000 1y ago
  I believe you, and this has been know for decades. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755 The underlying truth here is worse than 'majority of educated are illiterate'. Collectively, we've built these delusions into our culture. Perhaps there is less suffering this way.
  • smeej 1y ago
    This is wild, but is exactly what I'm talking about. Only 13% of adults were proficient in reading prose or documents. Thirteen! I knew "most" American adults couldn't. I didn't realize it was 87%.
• mvdtnz 1y ago
  I think that you're greatly overstating the point. > But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. I doubt that you have done this, but if you have please stop doing it. This is literal insane behaviour.
  • photonthug 1y ago
    I don't know. Talking with strangers is always kind of insane, or at least a pretty illogical leap of faith, because there's not much chance that the interaction is interesting or amusing. Now a stranger that walks up to me and demands some dramatic reading of Paradise Lost, stat? Ok, I'm intrigued, hold my beer and buckle up while I let you hear about regions of sorrow and darkness visible because the produce section has never seen some shit like this
    • smeej 1y ago
      Talking with strangers in a shared cultural space like a grocery store is one of the most normal occurrences in the history of humanity. It is incredibly telling that it strikes you as "always kind of insane."
      • photonthug 1y ago
        Huh? I defended your proposal of asking strangers to read stuff against the detractors here, because even though it's a bit obnoxious, I think it's a more interesting conversational gambit than discussing sports or something. And now I'm the weirdo? You attack your allies here in a way that raises questions about your own ability to read well.
• jraph 1y ago
  > walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words Of course. I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech. What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle. Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth. With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read. Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read. We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently. For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.
  • kixiQu 1y ago
    > With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read. Even "caught off guard", not "feeling particularly positive", and "reading phrasing from someone else", some people have so fundamentally mastered reading as a skill that this wouldn't be difficult for them even if the challenge were attempted drunk. The point of the parent comment was, I believe, that for such people it may be hard to imagine that others would believe "reading a wall of text is indeed hard" because it isn't for them.
• StefanBatory 1y ago
  ... if I was asked by a stranger to read a page of book for them out of blue in a store, I'd be staring dumbfounded, questioning whether everything's alright with them.
• wiseowise 1y ago
  You overlooked one crucial fact. > I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all. They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?
  • conductr 1y ago
    This. If someone sends me a full page email, I immediately skip it. No time for that. They'll follow up more concisely when it becomes important. Or if it requires such elaborate description, a phone call or meeting would have probably been a better channel for this communication. Likewise, anytime I start typing an email and it gets lengthy I know I'd be better off picking up the phone/scheduling a call.
    • andelink 1y ago
      I’m sorry, but you can’t find five minutes (if even) to read an email? No way your day-to-day life is so completely composed of things demanding your full attention that you don’t have a couple minutes to read an email. You typed out this comment, presumably after reading the thread. Surely you have time if someone you know sent you an email. You could read it in the time it takes to brush your teeth.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • conductr 1y ago
        I think you're assuming my inbox activity looks like yours, and based on your comment I can assure you it does not. Work only, I get 300+ per day. They're all valid and most of them go unread, especially the long ones. I also am in meetings most of the day, so email is not my highest priority. I scan and respond where essential, or often CC someone that I can delegate an action/decision to. Like I said, if things get urgent and I've not responded - people can find me other ways. If email was as much as a priority to me as you want it to be, you're right, I probably wouldn't have time to respond here. I also wouldn't have time to use the restroom or sleep. To flip the script, why are you composing full page emails? How much time does that take? Are you allergic to the phone? Do you want an answer? Do you want it timely? So on... as the sender in async communication, it's poor taste to jam wall of text infront of someone and have any expectation of when it will be read or acted on (same as the guy in the grocery store mentioned in this thread). The only exception is perhaps if it's from a superior and your job is to prioritize their communications - which of course I do, do that when I scan my inbox. There are people I always read and respond to, the vast majority of people sending me emails are not in that list.
• joshvm 1y ago
  Is it fair to assume that comfort in speaking/oration correlates to reading comprehension? I don't know that what you've described is any different now than 20 years ago when I was in high school. People struggled to read aloud texts like plays or classic literature. I would use that as a bar for complex prose that benefits from good narration; often the point was to encounter unfamiliar words or meter and to read with the purpose of critical analysis. A friend of mine is an author and we did a group reading of a play they'd written. Quite hard to do off the bat. Similarly if you've ever tried to DM a role-playing game like DnD, where the text you read is semi-randomly chosen based on what the characters decided to do (also, will you role-play dialog?). I've worked in academia for 10+ years at this point. You can tell almost immediately if a presenter has had practice, knows their material or is comfortable speaking in public. Lecturers and professors are, unsurprisingly, often very comfortable giving presentations and there are people who live for conferences and working groups. We're required to read dense material frequently. Understanding of a piece of work, or the attention span required to ingest a scientific paper, does not necessarily mean you could read it aloud fluently.
• conductr 1y ago
  I think one can possess decent reading comprehension skills while also be deficient in their reading aloud skill. Beyond classroom requirements, reading aloud is not a typical activity many people engage in even if reading silently is.
• pfg_ 1y ago
  I can read in my head fine. Reading aloud I'm slow and words come out stilted. It's a skill that takes practice to be good at, and it's rare to need. I don't think that's a useful metric.
• jccalhoun 1y ago
  While different places define "literate" differently, I've seen figures that say 20% of adults in the USA are functionally illiterate.
• jobigoud 1y ago
  But you are mixing input and output. It's obvious if you think about learning a foreign language. Parsing written text silently is a completely different task than producing speech with the right intonations, even if you recognize the words. Reading aloud fluidly requires a certain speed and anticipation. You have to be reading the next word in your head while you are still pronouncing the previous one. This isn't necessarily correlated with reading comprehension which is purely input.
• gkanai 1y ago
  Every day one step closer to the reality of Wall-e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
• rafaelmn 1y ago
  >I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work. How is that relevant ? Reading out loud is not the same as reading ? I struggle to keep pace with reading out loud - because I am just not used to it. I do better now that I read to my kids, but I don't think I have reading problems - reading out loud is a skill that's on top of reading. Speech patterns, words you're used to pronouncing, etc. all make reading out loud more difficult than speaking or just reading IMO