You know they read poorly, comprehending little in their passive laziness. So you write for the lazy—accommodating them as they are. Pragmatically smart and efficient of you, you think.
But what do they do—them and most everybody else? They get accustomed by all the writers doing this—lowering the barre, that is—and society is worse than it was before.
And with the popularization of social media, they now expect that they can ignore the information given, and ask questions at will for those points of information that happen to arise in their minds as nice-to-have. It does not occur to them that the writer who (wrote those several paragraphs that they did not read) would be the one who knows what all needs knowing on the subject. No, they think that if a thing needs knowing, surely, they’ll realize it, and can ask about it.
So they skip the reading and ask their questions, throwing the burden right back onto the writer, and putting him in the awkward spot of choosing whether to call them out on their irresponsibility, or of chasing them down that slippery slope in order to provide a customized reiteration of what he already wrote—as if this is the kind of audience of which he had really been dreaming in the first place.
Perhaps at some point, we realize that we simply must let some go. Else, we lower the barre to the floor, where there’s no point but empty pride in having a barre at all.
