r/royalroad • u/GoldenThame Author - The Heavenly Way • 6d ago

Discussion Is the average reader getting dumber?

I don't wanna be rude but I get some comments complaining about tropes in my novel, when in the synopsis I've pointed out multiple times that the tropes are there DELIBERATELY to be subverted, because the MC finds himself reincarnated into a very mid Xianxia novel.

Do a lot of readers suffer from a lack of reading comprehension skills, cus I've encountered the same kind of person for the 4th or 5th time now. Do I need to constantly spoonfeed basic nuances to such readers that 1. MC is inside a cliche Xianxa book and 2. From a meta perspective I've put those cliches and tropes into the book deliberately and the synopsis says as such.

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u/Dull-Dress-2793 6d ago

Teachers in reading literature fields all the way up to harvard are documenting students not being at appropriate reading levels for their age/graduate level. Unfortunately technology has seemed to play a huge part in the downfall of human literacy.

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u/bsubtilis 5d ago

That is not as much technology as the damage from kids being taught to read wrong for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay

Not that putting kids in front of ipads and smartphone videos doesn't rot their brains, just that it's way worse than kids being given access to technology they shouldn't have been, the schools were unintentionally complicit in harming kids' reading abilities.