The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.
It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.
Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.
This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.
But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.
This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.
But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.
Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.
Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.
We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.
Why are they booing me?
They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.
They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…
…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…
Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.
The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.
It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.
Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.
This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.
But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.
This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.
But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.
Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.
Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.
We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.
Why are they booing me?
They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.
They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…
…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…
Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.