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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, it really throws me off. I’m a little overly sensitive to body language and other cues about what a person is thinking and feeling, and some of that is messed up when the speed is increased.
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.
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.
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.
WHAT? THEY GET ME HOOKED ON THAT SHIT AND JUST STOP DEALING!?
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
A book.
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…
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.
I assume it’s similar how I can’t get in to manga, but I can enjoy a novel or animated stuff. Just can’t seem to enjoy those black and white squares with questionable art in them. Just doesn’t speak to me.
Have you tried any that are criticallyhighly regarded? I certainly wouldn’t describe the art in Akira or any of Otomo’s books as “questionable”. Obviously there’s cheaper stuff out there but there is extremely high quality Manga.
Also a lot of the more big name manga are shonen which can run the range of of “questionable” which makes it harder for westerners to get into. While seinen for example generally doesn’t have as much fan service overall but its often times not as much or it is recontextualized as bad, for example that horse in Bezerk.
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
What’s a chapter book?
Most adults just call them ‘books’. But in case you want more, it’s a book with chapters like “Chapter 1 - in the beginning’ and so on. Very few pictures, lots of words. in the US, youth call them chapter books because it’s a moment of transition from reading short simple stories to books more than 100 pages long.
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