Originally published at: Paper Reading Boosts Comprehension More Than Digital, Study Finds
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I have my doubts about this kind of test.
Perhaps it’s not the medium but rather the content which may be harming comprehension.
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I wonder if this is another one of those studies that the actual report says something statistically completely different from the conclusions drawn. Or at least something that doesn’t read to the conclusions drawn.
The chief way nowadays to learn software engineering, new languages, and what not is through online tutorials and guidebooks. If comprehension didn’t occur, we wouldn’t be able to write software. None of the conclusions found here seem to match reality.
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What if I use e-ink/e-paper?
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I don’t think software is a good example. That’s usually more interactive than just reading, work on the tutorial, find the docs for what’s failing in your program.
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Ah, GIGA.
I feel pretty safe on the BBS, though.
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Reading speed is connected directly to reading comprehension which can go as fast as you can scroll or swipe your finger. For hyperlexics like me it’s always been an issue. It’s also an issue for folks who have been trained in speed reading too.
Sure you can sop up a lot of information quickly but for folks with these issues/training it can be quite easy to miss context, subtlety and struggle with stuff like unreliable narration.
Take Elon for example. Dude boasted about reading the entire dictionary when he was in elementary school. He said his favorite fictional book is Lord Of The Flies and he thinks it’s a great idea to maroon people on Mars hahaha. So yeah, he missed the mark and it helps explain his years long obsession with Twitter 
. For hyperlexics seeing words fires up the brain in way that’s the complete opposite of those with dyslexia like comparing a 4th of July fireworks show to a flickering candle in a dark room
Learning fast isn’t the issue, but learning the wrong lessons fast is.
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Well that was just one example. Almost all books nowadays are edited digitally and that entire process between editors and authors is almost entirely done digitally nowadays (and sadly, in Word. Ugh). Writers are doing first pass drafts and editing digitally. This whole study seems like it’s comparing apples and oranges.
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If social media is in there, absolutely. What’s the text equivalent of that anyway? Graffiti wars? Letters to the editor? A debate, but that’s not written?
Ideally, you’d be comparing the same texts, which shouldn’t be that hard when a lot is available in both media.
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What’s A? Autocarrot?
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Probably they said the same things about the books…
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Yes, TFA does mention maybe the digital text is not as well written as paper.
That being said, something is harming my comprehension!
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So, ideally, I need to pay SAGE $37.50 to read the pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543231216463
I need to pay my printer manufacturer for the privilege of printing it out,.
Or I could just skip the traditional print reading and just discuss it on social media, for free.
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Reading from the abstract it looks like this is a “meta-study”, which means it gleaned all its data points from other studies that may or may not be related to what they’re testing, and is of school age children. I would wager this is one of those studies that ends up not being reproducible.
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That is exactly what it says (according to the Guardian article):
This may be because the “linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts”, he added. Text on social media, for example, may be conversational and lack complex syntax and reasoning.
TL;DR: If all you read is Facebook and Xitter, where all the text is written by your Trumpy uncle, your three influencer nieces and BasedWhiteBoi1488, your reading comprehension is going to suffer. If you pick up a book from time to time, you may be exposed to, and able to handle, a little more complexity.
There’s also the fact – which they also mention – that a book doesn’t keep popping up notifications to let you know that new content is available in some other book (they don’t put it quite like that, but that’s the gist).
I absolutely believe that social media has done a number on my own comprehension, focus and retention (although in my case it may be hard to separate the effect out from the effects of advancing age). But it does seem likely that what you read has a bigger impact than the form in which you read it. I don’t think printing out your Twitter feed is going to make it much less damaging.
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Maybe it’s time to bring back the print version of BoingBoing.
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With an animated version of the original Jackhammer Jill logo as a flipbook.
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TL;DR
(Not a complete sentence, but a snarky joke, discourse. But this is. Sorta. A fragment of one. Several, even.)
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ah okay. so what you’re saying is, the fact that it’s on my phone, and maybe because the screen is smaller - that’s what makes it harder to understand…
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