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Hello Reader,
Got Reading?
I wrote to Derek Sivers, commenting on his 80 hours of being podcast interviewed. (link)
Dear Derek,
Greetings from Western Canada.
You have noted something queer: For your company mass mail-outs, many people don’t read past (under ten sentences) Then they waste your time, writing back to ask you about something you put in the tenth sentence! Argh!
Commentary
Today I wonder: Is reading a letter, and reading in general, too hard for them? Are they too rushed? Or just too impolite? Maybe they are resenting you for “making” them read, in which case we might expect them to read politely when they are purely volunteers.
Your “people don’t read” finding is the biggest surprise since I was in university, when a future schoolteacher blew my mind. She said some university students, except for their coursework, don’t read at all. A few days later a graduate told me with great bitterness that some students say, “Great, it’s summer, now I don’t have to read anymore!” He might have also snarled (I forget) that people don’t read books after graduation, either.
On a brighter note, that year a young lady in my campus Toastmasters Club smiled big to tell me, “I’m reading because of you!” I didn’t ask why: It remains a mystery. I don’t think, back then, I would have dared tell people what book I was currently reading. Maybe I was quoting books in my everyday life. … Strange how one can role model by accident, just by being present.
Of course, Derek, for your mail-out, given their sheer numbers, the impolite “attention span challenged” are almost “normal,” and are therefore not to be criticized. How queer. No wonder you make all your blog posts very short.
I don’t think you or I would ever hit “reply,” to ask a question before we finished reading. Then again, we have a lifestyle policy of being polite, and you, having graduated Boston’s Berklee College, can “read good.”
Is reading too hard for the everyday musicians on your mail-out? Maybe so. Think of bus riders: You may view so many bent over their devices—but are they reading? Then, on your mind’s screen, you swipe left to view that same bus a decade before digital: Nobody is reading. Maybe one person. Easier to be thinking thoughts, or be flat lined and bored, rather than to step up the gravity curb to read.
From childhood I knew Mark Twain’s quote, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over someone who can’t read.” As God is my witness, I thought he meant one individual per town—as in town drunk, town idiot, and town nonreader. At last I get it. There must have been lots of literate adults choosing to be non-readers back in his day, too.
Yours truly,
Sean Crawford
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