#zettel #reading #learning #question #adhd #media-mindfulness #media-literacy sourced from: [[@carlson_they_2024]] # Do I Actually Know How To Read?? This might sound like a dumb question to ask, but given the rise of illiteracy in the modern era, concerning people *my age*, I feel like have to ask this question: "Do I Actually Know How to Read?" I can, of course, read. I wouldn't be able to maintain these notes if I couldn't. But when it comes to reading something and gathering information from it, do I have the skills to do that? How do I know that I have these skills? ## When I was Younger I have always generally struggled with following the story when I read a book. I think this had to do with my undiagnosed ADHD. In Middle and High School, it was always more of a chore to read the books that were assigned to me because I couldn't get a good grasp on the things that were happening in the story. I would read the words, and understand what they meant, likely parse the sentence well-enough, but I'd struggle to connect the sentence to the previous one, which meant that my understanding of a paragraph didn't come naturally either. This then meant that if I wanted to "succeed", I'd have to re-read the paragraph and look at it from a birds eye view. I'd lose the forest for the trees, so to speak. ## Currently in my 20s When I read now, I think about the text in a way that aims to eventually circle back to the whole piece after finishing. I'll read something, take it at face value, and then, once finished with the relevant passage, I'll return to the start and attempt to make sense of the whole piece based on what the whole piece communicated. This isn't ideal, but I think that's how we "read". In scientific reading, this looks like reading an abstract, then the paper, and then the abstract again. ## Related Thoughts: - When I play visual novels (lol btw), like [[Hundred Line Last Defense Academy]], I find that sometimes I speed read dialogue that appears to be repetitive in nature. Sometimes I fear I lose out on characterization in this process, but at the same time, I struggle to care if I'm skipping past someone asking a repetitive confirmation question. I understand that this is [[Aizuchi]], and is not a thing that we do in English that they do in Japanese, but I still worry that I'm not actually "reading" in the sense that I'm understanding information. - Also reminds me of how Netflix has shifted to have it so that the writing in movies on their platform is worse because people are not paying attention as noted by [[@Casual Viewing - Will Tavlin]]. - Maybe media literacy is just generally getting worse because we have so many general distractions. Something about our attention spans. - [[Reading on a Computer Screen is Less Intuitive To Me than Reading on Paper]]