This is a post about how a great many Americans today read.
They start out with as much mental energy as they’re going to have, and their attention starts fading out from there.
Plus, they’re not as willing as their ancestors to read what is on your mind. Instead, they’re likely only interested in getting answers to the questions that pop into their minds.
Rather than to read a whole article, they prefer to get whatever they think the gist is, and then they’ll ask questions about the rest, if it occurs to them to do so—even if you already went to the trouble to anticipate all those questions and answer them in writing in advance. They don’t mind pushing the burden back onto the writer in this way. They lack a sense of responsibility about the reading.
By the time they’ve gotten this far—if they haven’t quit by now—they’ll only be paying attention at a fraction of the rate they paid attention to the first sentence. Further, once they see that a paragraph is more than two lines long, they tend to shut down all the faster. They also get triggered to shut down if your sentences are thorough and well-composed, or if the vocabulary is a stretch for them
They are not accustomed, as were more of their ancestors, to thoughts that take more than a few seconds to process. They are no longer willing to do the work.
And it is hard to see in this much of a future for us.
To them, it is insane that anyone would work this hard. (Congratulations for finding this, you clever soul!)
