One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
What's happening to reading?
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Re: What's happening to reading?
#12I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.
There are few youtube channels where host reads lot of publications on a particular current topic and gives his opinion summarizing the articles. This way news publications don't get monetary benefits but the youtube channel does. People who are just lazy to read will invariably gravitate to such methods of consuming news. I remember there was an article where one account was shared among the whole institution. It's exactly that but at a much wider scale. I expect crack down on fair use by such publications on those news channel.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#13I can’t read it (lol) due to paywall, but 100% it’s because we stopped teaching kids how to read. But good luck trying to hold public schools accountable! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/the-daily/readin...
The article is about "AI" not people stopping reading even before "AI". Someone trying to jump on the bandwagon...
Sorry but if we can't correlate learning to read with literacy we're not allowed to correlate anything at all. Comprehension is massive and the difference between college and 6th great reading comprehension is an ocean that influences whether people pick anything up or pass it to ChatGPT.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#14[flagged]
Re: What's happening to reading?
#15One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
This gave a literal LOL
Re: What's happening to reading?
#16Sign up for Libby, get free New Yorker articles from library. Remember libraries?
Re: What's happening to reading?
#17Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#18One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.”
Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm#cP
Re: What's happening to reading?
#19One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
This gave a literal LOL
I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too.
“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”
Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#20Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes th…
Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.