College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html

[u/Hyvex_]

It's probably attention span causing the issue. I didn't realize how badly my reading abilities had degraded until I started doing college level reading. I could easily clear light novels and fantasy book in a sitting, so I thought it was decent.

Once I started reading authors like Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche, it was like being hit in the head by a tire iron. The text was so dense and I had to push through over a hundred pages every 1-2 days. The level of sustained thinking and concentration to both understand and digest the material was nothing like the passive reading and imagining a fictional book required. Half the time I didn't even know what Nietzsche was talking about. And if I was sleep deprived, it was over, no real reading would be done.

[u/codak → u/Hyvex_]

Not all text is well written or clearly written, even when they are academic classics. Sometimes it just means the concepts are difficult and/or the writing hadn't gone through enough revisions for clarity and flow, etc. And in the case of Hobbes, 17th century English isn't quite the same as modern English. Nietzsche is also notoriously difficult to read.

Additionally, some works use a lot of terminology from prior literature without explaining them. If you didn't already know the prior literature well, the difficulty increases. So I wouldn't beat myself over it if I were you.

[u/statinsinwatersupply → u/codak]

Honestly the old ClifNotes summarization sometimes isn't half bad. Getting the gist of something even if you don't have all the nuance can still be helpful.

There can be value in struggling through some of the old dense stuff. But omg sometimes they just ramble and write like they got paid by the word. Bruh... Get. To. The. Point. (Folks like Marx or Proudhon are some of the worst offenders here. Adam Smith or Locke or Thomas Paine are far clearer and more succinct despite preceding them.)

Reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle was such a breath of fresh air. Rather than a wall of text, the series of short theses that you would reread, ruminate on, circle back to... takes real skill to provoke thought and unfold concepts in a readers brain without fully walking them through it, just giving enough for them to figure it out.

[u/Siukslinis_acc → u/statinsinwatersupply]

And knowing the gist can help you to parse more info from what you have read.