I read a lot of science fiction, and a younger friends at work frequently asked me for recommendations, and he liked talking about the books after reading them. At some point I found out that he exclusively consumes them as audiobooks, which is fine and I didn’t think much about it. Some years down the line, when I was getting ready to retire, I had to pass on things to him. There was enough of it that, in addition to working elbow-to-elbow with him, I documented all the details in some long emails. When we meet, I’d say “The details are in the email,” and focus on explaining the big picture.
It became obvious that he never read the emails. When I talked to him about it, he admitted that he really struggles with any long block of text. The guy is really smart, and he knows a lot about a lot of things, but he gets all his info from audio and video because struggles to consume text. There’s clearly some kind of learning/mental issue going on there. It’s going to make the job tough for him, but I hope he works it out.
If someone is trying to convey important information, I’d rather get an email, than a text. And, I’d rather get a text than a voice call.
Writing requires thought to form sentence that make sense. And, forces the person to slow down a bit and gives them time to think about what they are staying. Also, they at least have the opportunity to read before they send, to check if they left anything out. Finally, and this is especially important in business, we have a “paper trail” that can be referred back to.
It took me years to stop the owner of the business I worked for to stop giving me instructions verbally. He did end-runs around shop policy to get his own pet projects prioritized. Policies that he put into place. Why do business owners sabotage their own businesses?
I’m with you, I like written things that I can digest and refer back to, though it’s worth mentioning that if you have questions, it much quicker to work through those face to face.
That is so crazy for me on a personal level because I’m the exact opposite. My brain has a really hard time processing auditory instructions.
Seriously, written guide > > > > > > > video guide
I’m good with distilling information in whatever form, but I do get impatient with audio/video sometimes. I can read faster than people talk, so I want the audio to go faster. I’ve tried upping the playback speed, but we encode a lot of information in the pauses and cadence of speech, and the faster playback screws with the perception of that. Doing that is fine for technical information, but I don’t care for it with a novel.
Interesting, never though about the cadence thing. I usually try to speed up videos. It works fine for casual YouTube videos but never for podcasts or anything where I need to retain the information.
This is also a great example of how, even if there are no disabilities involved, everyone has different learning styles. Some people just process information differently.
If only everyone recorded personal logs like in Star Trek you could have just bequeathed him those! On a serious note though, good on them for trying to learn and expand their knowledge even with some sort of learning disability. I was diagnosed with ADHD like 30 years ago and I understand how troubling it can be trying to read things while constantly having to re-read sentences because you spaced out, or having to keep 5 browser tabs open because each new section brings up some other topic that I now need. I describe my learning/throught process as a spider web for good reason.
I actually prefer text for the same reason. No need to pause and rewind, then once again forget what I wanted to hear and go back for the 4th time.
I by far prefer text for things that matter.
One of my favorite Youtube channels (Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles) has great videos about WWII airplanes and aeronautical technology, really digging into the weeds with original source material kind of stuff. But: they’re just him reading a script he’s written and showing still pictures and excerpts from pilot manuals etc. His content would make excellent written blog posts or even a book, but then nobody would read it. He has to turn what is fundamentally written material into videos in order to make any money off of his work because that’s what works for most people. Just makes me sad.
This is why I love ones like Kurzgesagt that publish sources and ‘read more’ pages for their videos.
That’s good, when I’m medicated I can sink into a book without as much trouble but typically I need more stimulus to be able to focus. It’s a fine line though bc too much stimulus and I’m right back into that zone you described.
Life is hard enough without those extra challenges. Hang in there.
🙏
Something else I forgot to mention was a concept that I learned in the military called BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. The idea is that most people aren’t going to read past the first sentence or two before skipping to the end so you better get the absolutely critical information out right away; before your reader gets bored/decides they have more pressing matters to deal with. I would regularly see emails that started with a summary before even the salutations.
I just saw this at work today for the first time from a younger person. No one I’ve ever emailed with has done summaries before. It took me by surprise… especially because this is an organization that is built on reading things.
Oh, yes, we use BLUF at work a lot, but it’s not really useful if you’re trying to pass along detailed knowledge.
They found a way to learn that works for them. As someone that almost always prefer text, I understand why you feel this way but you must have realized that most people prefer this format. And as far as I can tell, so long as they can read an email when it’s important (which they’ll learn one way or another), it will be fine.
He’s been working at the company for more than 15 years and still struggles to read any significant block of text, so I’m worried for him. It’s not that he prefers audio, it’s that text is a real problem for him.
And don’t misunderstand me: I’m the guy’s biggest cheerleader; I very much want him to succeed and am happy with any viable workaround he finds. I’m not pushing any sort of personal bias on him. The company works with a lot of text.
so long as they can read an email when it’s important
At my last job I managed a team of coders in India. They absolutely, categorically refused to ever read anything that I wrote to them, no matter what the situation. I had to maintain a 4AM-noon schedule just so I could have realtime interactions with them at least part of my day and give them instructions verbally. To their credit, they didn’t really listen to what I said much, either.
I still wonder whether it was a side effect of being able to speak English but not being able to read and write it very well, or whether they were consciously trying to avoid having any paper trail that they could be held accountable for.
Google Gemini will turn a block of text into a podcast convo to help people with this particular quirk. Have him try it out
Audio input of information is many factors slower than reading can be. Better to try and fix a reading problem.
The text in question would be behind a firewall, but I believe there’s a corporate LLM now. I’ll suggest it.
The Gemini podcast is going to condense your text and make it conversational, but it will necessarily lose detail in the process. A better recommendation is the Eleven Labs Reader, it’ll just read any text or file you throw at it with top tier voice models. Can use it for free and they have paid plans for more use. They also have a “podcast” generator option like Gemini, but I haven’t tried it so can’t vouch for the quality.
I use Eleven Labs all the time for things I want to read, like email newsletters, industry publications, etc but never find the time to sit down and read. Now I can have AI read them to me while I walk the dog. Super handy imo
Eleven Labs Reader
Thanks for the recommendation. For it to be useful for him, it would have to work on Windows (where the emails and documents he’s reading are). I’m seeing a phone app, do you know if there’s a windows one? I’m sure he’d have to have a paid version for corporate use.
I’ve known several men that were proud that they didn’t read books. (Not that they read manga or anything, either.)
One of them, in particuular, was a grown up version of a stereotypical highschool bully. Willfully ignorant doesn’t begin to describe him. I ever meet him in a dark alley, I’d fucking gut him.
Anyhow, this behaviour (pride in ignorance) among women is rare enough that I’ve never seen it. When I was doing online dating, I had great success asking what they’re reading and using decent grammar and vocabulary.
Anti-intellectualism and willfull ignorance have a lot to do with the situation here in the US. I think it’s mostly a male problem as well.
Have you ever done any sort of IT support? I was internal IT in my first job and we had those people. It was mostly women 50+ years old who were proud that they know nothing about computers and would actively avoid listening when I tried to tell them how to do something trivial. Even when it was part of their jobs to do it. Then they would ask for help with the same stupid shit a few weeks later.
Fucking hell, so much this. They’re so goddamn proud of their ignorance. This is why I enforce a very strict “we’re mechanics, not chauffeurs” policy in my team. We’ve got no duty - either literal or moral - to make up for incompetence.
Not IT support directly but I’ve had that same experience with plenty of boomer men in machine shops. They’re fucking proud that they suck at computer yet CNC has been around since the '80s in a big way.
Ran a shop for a while and still have the terminating document from when I fired one of those fuckers.
If I was as bad at reading and responding to emails as the folks I support…
Highschool bullies are just a grown up version of middle school bullies. That shit was supposed to stop there.
And many of them never grow out of it and become President.
I met a lot of women like this also. It just manifests differently. Rather than books it will be the newest celebrity drama/reality show.
No one’s talking about anon’s weird assumption that authors go from idea directly to manga, and not that most authors start by writing a novel to attract a sponsor.
Shhhh, that would require actual understanding of the culture and not just laziness.
I had a coworker approach me on break and start telling me about a book he was reading and how much he was enjoying it. Towards the end, he mentioned struggling with it and that he wished someone had told him how great reading was earlier. We were both damn near 30, and it was a YA novel. I resisted the asshole urge to roast him because, shit, at least he’s trying?
I’m glad reading is cool now.
Not only is he trying, he laments not learning better when he was younger. Great self-awareness, and taking ownership today.
Very true. Hopefully, he still enjoys reading today.
And now you get to recommend him all the good stuff he missed!
He is an obese man in the gym. Literally nothing more admirable than someone improving themselves.
My spouse always says, you don’t mock a sick person in hospital, why mock someone who is working to improve other aspects of themselves.
Exactly! And not just doing it, but sticking to it AND vulnerably admitting to struggling.
If only more people could do it.
When I was in the US Air Force, I was deployed to a US Marine camp once, and listening to those guys chat among themselves was always a treat. You never knew what dumbass comments were going to come out of their mouths.
One day, one of the young corporals mentioned that, while traveling to another base, he got stuck waiting for a connecting flight between bases for about a week and he was so bored, he read A BOOK. He stressed the fact that he’s never read an entire book from cover to cover before, but he did on this layover because he was so extremely bored.
To my surprise, the other Marines just nodded along, like this made perfect sense to them. Not a single person harassed him for never reading a book before (and they harass each other all the time for the simplest things).
I mean, we poke fun at Marines for being dumb. They call themselves jarheads, which is an allusion to the fact that their heads are as empty as a jar. But it still blows my mind to hear the dumb things they say sometimes.
That’s not why Marines are called jarheads. While we do love the occasional crayon, we’re not all stupid.
Jarhead first originated somewhere during WW2 because the high collar on some of our uniforms making it look like our heads were popping out of jars. The term has meant a few other things since then, like referencing the high and tight haircut, or being so “uptight” on their training and discipline and described as having that hat screwed on tight like the lid of a jar.
For the record I read a lot! I love reading. My group of friends in there read a lot. We played tons of RPGs.
I had a friend tell me that she didn’t learn to read until she was like eight. Ya never really know where people come from. All of our lives are so different.
That doesn’t sound too bad considering almost half of Americans (regardless of age) reads below 6th grade level. At 8 you should still be able to overtake most grownup Americans in reading skills.
I dont think that is considered particularly late here in central europe. Yes, kids should be able to read properly at 6, but a lot of them don’t.
I wasn’t capable of reading completely on my own until I was nine years old. I also made top grades in all of my college English classes. Where you start doesn’t necessarily dictate where you’ll end up, especially if you enjoy an activity as much as I enjoyed reading.
We’ve all got to start somewhere.
I read YA as Yaoi and I’m like “or course it’s reasonable to roast him for telling a coworker about the Yaoi he’s reading”
No, the correct reaction is “I do not know the Jah-Oi of which you speak. What is this art form that I have never heard of?”
A while back I read several bad books in a row and decided to try manga for a break. Some of them were good, others weren’t. Then I got frustrated because most of the stuff I was reading wasn’t finished, so I sought out the source material novels that were further along. Ended up finding some really good books that I otherwise would have never knew existed.
Highly recommend the Ascendence of a Bookworm novel.
trust me, it is indeed easy to hate reading if you have asshole teachers. he got lucky and was able to discover reading at a later age.
It’s better to read what you enjoy than what you “should” be reading.
Given enough time, they’ll maybe become the same thing anyway.
Struggling how though?
If they were struggling with the vocabulary, then that might be roastable.
But if they meant, e.g., struggling with the themes, that might be understandable. YA books sometimes tackle difficult subjects or are subtle, layered, etc.
Why roast someone trying to improve? We haven’t all had the same opportunities in life.
Why roast someone trying to improve? We haven’t all had the same opportunities in life.
Why don’t you ask @[email protected], who I was responding to?
It was the general reading/vocabulary.
I don’t think it matters in this context. Person is trying to get into reading, nothing roastable about that.
The problem with comic books is that they’re all about this big flashy pictures and they never have any words in them. Oh well, anyway, off to read some more Chainsaw Man and One Punch…
He looks absolutely enthralled by the wall of text lol.
God I’m remembering in Hunter X Hunter how there were entire spreads detailing complex rulesets for world building, and they legit felt like the silmarilion at times.
As you read these comments, remember that 56% of Americans read at a 6th-grade level or above; the rest read below that.
Please be gentle.
remember that 56% of Americans read at a 6th-grade level or above; the rest read below that.
I recall reading somewhere that adult literacy was at like 98% in the US. Though that was like 25 years ago, and I suppose a 6th grade level still counts as “literate”? Or did we slide backwards?
If we have to talk about this in terms of “grade levels”, at what point is someone actually considered illiterate?
Measuring two different things. Your number: can read the words, mostly understand the words they read.
6th graders are generally literate. However, they’re not necessarily picking up on nuance, or subtleties. And they will often not take into account how the sentence they just read fits into the overall context of the piece, and they likely won’t question the narrator, assuming they’re reliable.
You can imagine how half of adults being that bad at these things has colored political discourse.
However, they’re not necessarily picking up on nuance, or subtleties. And they will often not take into account how the sentence they just read fits into the overall context of the piece
Which explains sooo many internet arguments.
No this is about reading books, not arguing. Are you stupid?
God damn, it does.
There’s different levels of literacy as well. If we take things like math literacy and functional literacy into account (things like doing your taxes or filling out government forms), something like 60% of the adult population is functionally illiterate (below a third grade level) in at least one area.
WHAT? THEY GET ME HOOKED ON THAT SHIT AND JUST STOP DEALING!?
Not all of them did, just those that bought into these right wing grifters’ program. Most that did are reversing it, though, because it has been disastrous.
Yes. And, 25 is far less than ALL. And your article mentions that program is being dropped all over the place because the science doesn’t back up its claims. Even the program’s grifters are pivoting to incorporate phonics into it.
The way they get that grade level reading comprehension is dubious. If you read the news, non-academic magazines, and most of the NYTs best seller list, you likely have been reading primarily around that level according to these tests.
Also I don’t know if this is true for all of these types of tests but I got literacy test bi-yearly in school because I was in special education and apparently at least for the one I was administered it counted verbal reading speed towards your score. So you could talk at a slightly slower rate than prescribed but explain the full context of what you read and still get a lower rating.
Correct. Also getting to 6th grade is generally defined as the the language skills needed to read/write news, most novels, contracts, information pamphlets, etc. The use of specialized language, such as technical lexicons, is where you get into higher grade levels of reading. There isn’t any universal standard as to what determines this, exactly. Many tests also work on being able to make sense of sentences that gradually become more, and more, obtuse. Their length, use of punctuation, tenses, and other technicalities, are increased until the person can no longer explain the sentence correctly. The problem with this is that it may be technically correct, but it is bad writing. If someone where to ace a test on some of this overly complex sentence structure, they would actually do worse for submitting it to a test of the skills on writing a sentence explaining something. So a lot of this lexical grading of reading level is nebulous, and results will vary from each person reviewing them, and exactly how they are performed.
Up until the mid-60s, the US did not have a standard high school educational system. Some cities had high schools, some capped out at elementary or “middle” school. A few people went to college, but the overwhelming majority didn’t.
Early journalistic standards of the era sought to produce written works that could be
marketedenjoyed by the largest appreciable volume of people. So the standard for writing was set at the 6th grade level. Everyone from the NYT to Random House targeted articles and books to the 6th grade level, because this was where the maximal market share of reading consumers lived.Consequently we’ve produced a super-abundance of written material at the 6th grade level. If you’re no longer in school and you’re doing recreational reading, you’re most likely consuming something designed to be read by middle-schoolers. And because this is the de facto standard, and has been for over half a century, we have this enormous backlog of material - classical novels, famous newspaper clips, screenplays, speeches, encyclopedias, commercials - all geared to this level.
People maintain their skills with practice and this is no less true of reading than any other occupation. So when you survey people - many of whom haven’t touched a scientific paper or “advanced” novel in decades - as to their reading level, they consistently reproduce the skills for which the bulk of English written works are produced.
Okay, Canadians are still at a disadvantage compared to the average European. You and I aren’t so different.
wtf is a “chapter book”?
It’s a book with chapters. Basically a regular ass book. When kids are real little, their books are like 15 pages long. Then in like 1st or 2nd grade, they move onto reading big kid books - aka “chapter books” that have enough pages to warrant chapters.
You never hear someone over the age of 7 or 8 mention reading “chapter books” because they’re just know as books.
Except anon, who is dumb as fuck.
Anon could be a kid. On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Actually, a lot of content on 4chan looks like a giggling 8 year old posted it; especially the posts about poop.
Hehe, you said “poop”
Haha, penis!
There are regular books that don’t have any chapters. Most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Books are an example of this.
That threw me when I started Guards! Guards!. I generally only have time to read at night and stop at the first chapter break after 11:00. For several nights in a row I was reading until midnight, giving up, then forgetting by the next time. Eventually I checked ahead and realized there weren’t any, but a lot of his ‘sections’ are chapter sized, so it works out.
Really? I’ve read almost all of them twice and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that lol
Terry does include breaks and beats in the stories that many other authors would adorn as a new chapter, but he never does. honestly imo that makes things almost filmic - for example where a switch in perspective usually prompts a new chapter and pushes an author to make it longer, Terry can just write a single page or even a few paragraphs to tease you a bit of what’s going on elsewhere in the story, and then go back to the usual perspective but now with the added context & tension
that makes things almost filmic
His early books literally started with a visual description of the reader’s imagination “camera” gradually focusing on Great A’Tuin, the Disc, whatever region the action was going to happen in, and so on.
Filmic is exactly what he was going for.
There are divisions in the text that other authors might have broken into chapters. He is actually incredibly clever with those divisions, building sections longer or shorter to control the speed of the story.
A book.
With multiple chapters.
it is a book which is long enough that its broken into “chapters” so that you have a good stopping point to pause your reading for the day.
Or in the context of OOP, a book containing many1 pages of text and no pictures2
- greater than 30
- more than 0.5 pages of text per image
Literally just a book that isn’t made for children.
It’s like a webnovel but not necessarily web.
Do note: The US public education system has raised a significant number of younger millennials, genZ, and gen-α (especially in impoverished areas) to be functionally illiterate due to both profiteering and desire to destroy education. Effectively, they switched to literacy programs meant to help people with cognitive disabilities somewhat function in a world that has writing everywhere. This does not teach people how to read or comprehend. It also robs them of capacity to self-learn from texts.
So, there’s a massive cohort of people whose parents and/or caregivers were not able to be spend time teaching this extremely important skill who are likely below 6th grade reading level.
I heard schools have largely moved away from Phonics, which is wild to me. That’s basically how reading was taught going back to at least medieval monks.
I hear they’re using a “look and see” method or something? Word is that its how the Chinese teach their students to read…but they don’t have an alphabet, so I don’t know how that’s supposed to work in English.
I have a relative who just retired from teaching and she says its a real mess in early education because of how badly this reading teaching method works, and its only worsening as students mature.
There was a “program” that had been gaining popularity for years, put out by what are effectively scammers that denounced phonics for “sight reading” where kids were basically asked to guess what words were when next to pictures. This has largely been rejected and phonics reimplemented as it was a disaster
The Chinese do have a Roman alphabet called pinyin for educational purposes. It’s very consistent phonetically.
Eng Learning TLDR: I was raised with both sight words and phonetics, and realize that my gen was fucked over.
I’ve heard about the reading wars, but this was the first time I actually thought about it with my education, and I realize why I probably wouldn’t read as well if I didn’t have parents who actively read with me as a child.
I’m a 2006 baby, so I guess my elementary years were at the perfect time for this little debate to occur. I definitely remember doing sight words and their flashcards, but I swear we still did phonetics (thank god). But like, how would anyone expect a kid to magically learn words by just looking at it 50 times and hearing a teacher say that word? I get that according to this article, a large portion of Eng words can’t be read properly first try, but still, I see the value in having a kid connect the sounds of “cat, bat, hat, that,” etc. Yes, some homonyms like “to, too, two” are gonna have to be “sight words” but that’s unavoidable.
I hated Eng class, not because of sucking at it, but how we never really got free reading time after elementary, and that we were doing lame ass journals and reports on books I didn’t want to read. And there were high levels books I did want to read, which is why I loved a banned books project that gave us the freedom to pick a book to do a creative, in any format you want, presentation of the knowledge from the book.
So if I, a person who actually wanted to read and can read well hated Eng class, then people who have learning disabilities, are simply bored, didn’t have parents who cared, etc were cooked. I guess that’s why my college classmates are so incompetent rn…
Also side note about Chinese (or well, Japanese in my case):
Yeah, CN and JP use hanzi/kanji respectively, which are logograms, but both CN/JP have “alphabets” that can be used to tell you the reading of a word. Chinese uses pinyin (which is actually what most of their keyboards are based on I think), and JP has hiragana/katakana. It’s still however more useful to learn the readings for these characters in the context of what you’re reading (esp. Japanese, they got their writing system from China but used their own bastardized readings for words, so 生 has like 10+ readings depending on the word it’s paired with).
But they still have a neat trick in which kanji have two parts, the phonetic component, and the meaning component. Kanji are made of radicals, which is like using lego blocks to make a single character (i.e. 米 + 青 = 精). The neat part is that you can potentially guess the reading of a word if you already know that phonetic components reading. 青 can be read as “sei”, and these kanji 精, 清, 圊, 睛, etc. all have “sei” or a similar version as a potential reading. Now sometimes the radicals don’t always make sense meaning wise when added together. 青 is “blue/youth” and 米 is “rice”, but 精 means “spirit/ghost”, “energy”, and uh… “semen” (mostly in the word 精液 “spirit fluid”). Why rice + youth = spirit or ghost, is beyond me, but these kanji usually have interesting stories behind them that could potentially explain their reasoning.
JP Kanji Learning TLDR: JP is fun to learn and kanji have reading patterns based on their components.
LeVar Burton put out a documentary recently on the topic called “The Right to Read”.
Also, yeah, I’ve gotta give Japanese a proper go at some point. The characters look really interesting to learn.
Yeah, most of my knowledge on “Chinese” is from when i tried to learn Korean. Korean still lean on some Chinese characters (hanja?). Not for like “daily” reading/writing, but like, I remember newspaper articles would sometimes have the headlines in Chinese characters. They, of course, would use their Korean pronunciations, but there was no way to tell what that was from the character (unlike the rest of the Korean writing system, which uses an almost completely consistent phonetic alphabet).
Anon has aphantasia
You can still enjoy reading if you have aphantasia. I can’t picture shit, but verbose books tend to be my favourites.
Fuck by chapter book I thought they’re talking about Warhammer 40k novel about a specific Space Marine chapter and they’re disappointed because they don’t want to read 40k novels.
i thought “chapter book” meant a loooong novel being released in book sized chapters one by one like TV show episodes
That’s how Wildbow does it.
You’re in too deep brother!
Wew, I’m glad it’s not just me, because it would actually be a reason I wouldn’t read it.
No shade to 40k, it’s just something I can recognize as a dangerous rabbit hole for me, personally.
Chapter books belong in the Chapter House (Dune)
I had to search it to understand the post. Well, that’s a weird name to describe a normal book for children.
If there’s no pictures children won’t read them.
I can’t read without pictures!
Ancient Egyptians be like:
Actually, I wonder if people who have difficulty visualizing from words would struggle to, like, make their own pictures.
as a reader and writer with aphantasia, it’s literally never once mattered to me. i love a good fantasy and just don’t consider visualizing an obligate part of the experience. though i could definitely understand how it might be helpful
That’s great to hear. And for what it’s worth while I can imagine simple images, I don’t usually while I’m reading. I just sort of understand what’s happening in a non-visual way.
yeah exactly. i find it really interesting how some people just can’t separate understanding a text from internally picturing it. it makes me wonder if there’s some legitimate difference in information processing, or if people who can visualize tend to associate understanding with imagining even if they’re actually unrelated
As someone who has never been a big book reader (though I read tech manuals and news articles), I finally figured out I probably have aphantasia. This finally connected a lot of dots for me.
Do you enjoy graphic novels?
Not really, they just never felt entertaining to me. Most of my family members are big readers, I’m just the oddball.
And I think it’s wrong that people expect me to!
You can build up literacy like a muscle. I can read a lot if I forget to take my ADHD worsener (valproic acid), but even with that I can sometimes “rawdog” it.
This, I used to read a lot, even with my ADHD.
But for some reason I stopped, and now I struggle to focus reading.
Brains gravitate to the quickest easiest dopamine responses, and will ignore things that give rewards slower. ADHD brains are particularly bad for this.
I have the exact same issue. If I was able to give up scrolling social media, I’m sure I’d be back on the books again inside of a few weeks. We’ll just have to wait for the great collapse.
Any moment now
