Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.
They’ll read it and despite all the information being there, if it’s even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it’s complete gibberish or indecipherable.
Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it’s making me lose my fucking mind.
Absolutely. At work I realized that if I have paragraphs in emails most people will just read the first sentence and ignore the rest. I have resorted to breaking paragraphs in to very easy to follow bulleted lists and that seems to help a little bit.
I think the most common reason for this is that it forces people to go out of their routine/comfort zone to understand something, which many people aren’t willing to do, either consciously or subconsciously.
Man this pisses me off to no extent. I put in a lot of effort into my work. Craft very detailed emails with everything spelled out, clear as day. Only to find out time and time again no one is reading my emails because they’re too long, yet they have questions about certain aspects of the project… THAT WERE ANSWERED IN MY EMAIL.
Axios has this formalized in a style they call “Smart Brevity”. I’ve started using it in some cases and it really does improve readability. Their own use case is breaking down complex and evolving news stories, but it applies to a lot of situations.
