People Don’t Read Anymore

Reading is a lost art, as is basic comprehension.

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 pictures!

However, 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.

Clearly a comment from someone who had not read the article, or even look at the pretty pictures!

Well, to all of those who commented so stupidly on this post I say that you didn’t read even get as far as reading all of the words in the title. You didn’t notice that I intentionally misspelt the word, writer. So is ‘writter’ okay then?

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.

Want to discover more about Derek Haines? He writes regularly about publishing and writing on Just Publishing Advice and blogs his personal thoughts as The Vandal.