Memes

I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. It’s something we inherently think about every time we put pen to paper as it were.

Usually we have a good insight as to our physical paper’s readership. They tend to be older, well-educated, decent reading comprehension, etc. But since our paper is also available online, we also have to factor in the wider readership when the articles get shared. That’s where it gets tricky.

As you’ve pointed out, reading comprehension has sharply declined in general. I love the internet, but there’s no denying it also had some bad consequences with regards to people’s attention spans. The ‘too long, didn’t read mindset.

Because of that, we tend to front-load articles with the needed info and make paragraphs easy to skim. We also tend to write shorter and with less ‘fancy words’. Basically, I need to dumb things down to about 70 percent of my normal writing level. And even with that, you get dumb questions and comments by people who clearly didn’t bother to properly read and understand the first paragraph, much less the rest of the article.

It can certainly be frustrating. People used to read things to learn and get smarter. Now they just want their biases confirmed in as few words as possible.