Turret’s “serious” comment said that you claimed people should know about/have awareness of that Flesch-Kincaid reading level as a determinant of literacy…but you never said that.
I will admit I had to go back and actually read both comments because I tend to tune out long comments (many long comments are slavering diatribes not fit to store in any memory, long-term nor short). Maybe that’s what’s happened here.
Because they’re being somewhat derisive and structured their sentences to be less comprehensible
“…you have ironically demonstrated that a pre-existing functional understanding of the concepts at play is an important component of more advanced literacy.”
Translation: being familiar with more words/concepts gives you the ability to understand what was said on a deeper level.
This actually took more effort to write than the esoteric one, because I put in effort to make sure I’m not being esoteric for the sake of it. I’m not against using more vocab or higher level sentence structure, but the sentence I quoted is a perfect example of being verbose for no gain in understanding or richness in the sentence.
The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.
It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.
Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.
This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.
But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.
This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.
But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.
Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.
Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.
We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.
Why are they booing me?
They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.
They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…
…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…
Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.
Why are they booing you, you’re right?
Turret’s “serious” comment said that you claimed people should know about/have awareness of that Flesch-Kincaid reading level as a determinant of literacy…but you never said that.
I will admit I had to go back and actually read both comments because I tend to tune out long comments (many long comments are slavering diatribes not fit to store in any memory, long-term nor short). Maybe that’s what’s happened here.
Because they’re being somewhat derisive and structured their sentences to be less comprehensible
Translation: being familiar with more words/concepts gives you the ability to understand what was said on a deeper level.
This actually took more effort to write than the esoteric one, because I put in effort to make sure I’m not being esoteric for the sake of it. I’m not against using more vocab or higher level sentence structure, but the sentence I quoted is a perfect example of being verbose for no gain in understanding or richness in the sentence.
The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.
It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.
Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.
This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts… books, basically.
But… our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point… maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.
This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a ‘wall of text’, because they assume it is… some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.
But long form writing… was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.
Postage, mail, letters… would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call ‘essays’… just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.
Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.
We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.
Why are they booing me?
They aren’t very literate, they mainly understand ‘literate’ to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I’ve insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.
They’re more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean…
…they’re more concerned with labelling ‘good’ people with ‘good’ labels, and ‘bad’ people with ‘bad’ labels…
Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.