Reading is a lost art, and so is comprehending.
I know people don’t read because what I write is so often misunderstood, misconstrued or more often than not, ignored.
All people read are headlines or titles, but rarely the text. Worse, though, is that people who only read headlines are very fast to the keyboard to make a judgement, complain, boast or deride.
Okay, I am making a generalisation here. However, I will give you a clear example of what people do and do not read.
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the poor use of grammar by some writers. The title of my post was, Writters Who Should Of Done A Grammar Check.
It is not a long post, and it even includes an infographic! Yes, it came with lots of pictures!
But, I have received hundreds of tweets and Facebook comments regarding this post, and all of them concern the word ‘of‘ in the title. Only this morning, I received a Tweet saying that ‘of‘ was incorrect and that it should be ‘have‘, and words to the effect that I shouldn’t write a grammar post if I can’t get the title grammatically correct.
Well, to all of those who commented so stupidly on this post I say that you didn’t read. You didn’t notice that I intentionally misspelt the word, writer. So is ‘writter‘ ok?
Or is that irony is way above your head?
No, people don’t read anymore.
But they surely can shoot off their mouth and criticise, without reading or understanding a single word.
Remember back when our books were under fire from Trolls, Grammar Nazis, Pedants and Literary Snobs? None of them actually read a book from cover to cover. In fact, most based their so-called reviews on the first few pages of any given book thanks to Amazon’s free ‘Look Inside’ feature…
I remember only too well, Jack.