People binge-watch on streaming platforms.
I still have some catching up to do on the Kardashians.
This is going nowhere.
From the beginning Iâve been telling that most of todayâs content requires little focus (stuff that wouldnât even be considered for production not so long ago), and it keeps coming back to the time span part of the equation.
I want out.
Might be my fault though. Perhaps there are two separate questions hereâŠ
- Do people even read anymore ?
And
- Do people who read even read anymore ?
I listen to a lot of podcasts and talk-heavy videos in the background at two times speed, effectively cutting the listening time in half. Most of it isnât exactly âlittle focus requiredâ stuff. What does that tell about my attention span? Nothing. If I refuse to watch yet another two hour Marvel disaster and rather invest that time into a 20 hour tv drama â does that make me impatient or picky?
They buy more than they read. 
Source: MSN
As the article I linked up-thread points out, âfocusâ is really hard to measure. Youâve declined to engage with specific examples of âdeepâ modern content.
My argument, though, is that a lot of content has always been undemanding, and that people have always chosen âeasyâ entertainment solutions.
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Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. â Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Apparently they all read this article and took it to heart.
Most likely, yes. (I wasnât there, so that is just my thought on it, FWIW).
Given how the semicolon and its different uses/implications where a common thing, I canât think of how it couldnât be way more than 5%. (Perhaps 50-60% or even more.)
As for to know if people were able to remember what the beginning of the 2 pages long sentence was, and understand what he wrote the way he intended for it to be understood, thatâs a whole other thing.
He was ridiculed by many. So having complex, long sentences doesnât mean his writing was systematically considered better than someone elseâs. (That is so subjective anyways, no point getting into thatâŠ(?)) I personally like the feel I get from reading him. I find it inspiring. But damn me if I write anything that remotely goes along his style. My beta readers then say : that is hmm⊠convoluted. And Iâm talking normal length sentences. But the rhythmic/musicality intended seems to never make it to the readerâs brain.
People were deconditioned toward it. (I suppose that you have to expect it to be able to read it. Else the reader only âtripsâ on the commas. â Silently thinking âthe hell?â) And so it would seem to be an undesirable thing nowadays.
(Take the example of the semicolon, which is not only disappearing, but of which it is now common teaching to tell the students not to use it. How is that possible ? The only way such a thing can be, is that whoever thinks it is a good idea to ditch the thing, finds it useless, which in turn can only mean that that said person canât differentiate it from a period. In other words: that person has no F* idea what it does, how it calls for a different inflexion, and its grammatical role. â To me, it is just as smart as if the letter A was suddenly discarded.)
This being said, should one write today like he (Proust) wrote then, good luck getting published.
Commas, semicolon, ; â and â used to generate movement, âmelodicâ segments, but from what I can tell, that is a thing of the past. (Heck, Alice in wonderland even has - ( ) - all over the place.)
While today seems to be all about having the least punctuation possible. Short (almost pre-digested) sentences.
Along the same line:
Publishers were so eager to ditch ; - and/or , - , that even still today, there is a ton of books (recent books) where you find an aberration by which some sentences end with an em-dash, more than often opening up for a long segment without giving any clue as to whether the sentence is coming to an end, or if it will rather go on, the em-dash acting as a parenthesis.
Whether you like it or not, it makes a huge difference.
If it is a parenthesis, the reader has to keep the opening point âin a bufferâ.
I truly hate when the author does some stupid S* like that.
All this to simplify something that didnât need to be simplified.
Sometimes, by making things simpler, you only make them more complicated.
And sometimes down right impossible anymore. (Which is what I have mostly been saying here, in this thread.)
You still can use the said punctuation, but less and less people know what to do of it when reading.
That is actually how you kill art.
Give a painter only gray paint, then blame him for his lame painting.
This about 4,350 words long excerpt from Brandon Sandersonâs âThe Emperorâs Soulâ contains 372 periods, 295 commas, 16 em-dashes, 12 ellipses, 4 semicolons⊠you get the picture. Sadly no parentheses. Is this too little? Does it read ârushedâ? Genuine question.
The difference is that this time it will most likely be irreversible.
When the people will get fed up with books that are close to always just the same, the writers will have no way of bringing the music back into writing.
There wonât be much of a somewhere else to navigate toward.
I reject the claim that modern writing âlacks music,â just as I would reject the claim that Duke Ellington is âless musicalâ than Bach.
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How many people do you think there is out there who believe a comma to be designating a place where to mark a pause â perhaps breath in -, but nothing more ?
That wasnât the question. Lyricism is not a synonym for punctuation.
That wasnât my question either.
Technically, when reading, the reader is supposed to perform an upward inflexion on the last syllable preceding the comma.
(Try reading an old text without doing it. Say, The romance of Tristan and Iseult. Itâll be complete non-sense. Even to you. Youâll bump and bump into segments of sentences that will simply sound/look/feel as though they just donât belong there. Misplaced.)
Strangely enough, I canât even find a reference to that part of the rule no more on the web.
Iâll dig.
Else, if you find musicality into a text that is almost exclusively written using one-time and two-times sentences, well⊠well good for you. I donât have that pleasure.
One-time sentence:
She went to the park and met Mark as he was on his way back to his office after the lunch hour he just spent with some of his co-workers. 
Two-times:
The lady on the bench looked to her left, where she finally spotted him.
(Thatâs already not as bad, but it quickly becomes redundant.)
(Even more so, if I add another one.)
Rather than arguing about made up examples, Iâm going to spin off a new thread.
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I would regard myself as a punctuation fanboi â I certainly use semicolons liberally, and with relish â but I donât have a clue what those two specimens are supposed to convey. Iâm curious, however, and happy to flaunt my ignorance and ask.
I really have racked my brains over this. Iâm old-ish, have read widely, and copiously, compared to the average â obviously not enough â but canât recall seeing this usage at all.
On a more general point: I think of punctuation as one of the few tools that writers have to convey mood. In poetry, the line-break can be devastating. The important thing in any text is that the punctuation used is consistent throughout â or inconsistent in a way that makes it clear why.
The job of the writer is to convey to the reader whatever it is that the writer has on their mind. Obfuscating that unnecessarily seems to me to be counterproductive; but 'umans ainât rational, and art is art, I suppose.
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; â was, for the few places I stumbled upon it (and found it smart and relieving), used to mark that the main sentence is over. That what comes after the em-dash is a complement to the main sentence.
Poe used it. (Or at least Maupassant, in his French translations of.)
â There are a few in The Raven (English original version) â I just checked.
But in this case they are hard to spot, since it is a poem with line breaks. â But they are there alright.
Otherwise in short :
Say you have a sentence that ends with an em-dash â adding a little something to what was already said, or a âmodifier ofâ, so to say.
Now say you have another sentence that you may think will end with this here em-dash â but how do you actually know for sure that this sentence is âcoming to an endâ ? â, when in fact it wasnât ending at allâŠ
(Sometimes the content makes it relatively obvious â one can deduce it ; like in that last example, somewhat â, but not always⊠â Far from it, even.)
; â would have told you that the em-dash is not part of a pair. That the main sentence has just ended.
Say now you have this other sentence that ends with this here em-dash ; â there is no confusion as to whether the main sentence was over or not.
The thing is that when the em-dash is part of a pair (used like parentheses), the reader needs to buffer whatever the em-dash interrupted. Because thatâs where the sentence will land back to, before completing/finishing what got âinterruptedâ.
If the reader doesnât buffer, it is confusing and destabilizing.
The opposite is equally confusing : having buffered something when the sentence had actually ended.
The relation of the content as regard to the rest of the sentence, what it implies, is not at all the same from one case to the other. (Thus my preference to make sure it is clear to the reader.)
â Note that if what follows the em-dash is very short (say 5 words or less, ish),
I sometimes donât use ; â, but rather only the em-dash by itself, when I want to create a dynamic effect.
; â also dramatically changes the tone by which the last syllable of the word preceding it is pronounced.
word word wordâ â The pitch should rise. Somewhat âenergeticâ tone. Upwards.
word word wordâ ; â The pitch and tone drops. The sentence is over ; â but then gets relaunched.
, â Iâve seen often used the same way. (To indicate that the main sentence has just ended.)
But I donât quite like it.
Mostly because I much prefer to use it for something else:
If I write something like this â will you perhaps agree â, it is one thing.
While if I write something rather like that, â will you perhaps agree â, it is not quite the same.
And nor is it the same, will you perhaps agree, as this.
The emphasis (and slightly therefor the tone â though it is more of a âsuspendedâ feel, in the , â case) is different between when it is preceded by a comma vs. when it is not.
I use all three ; depending on what I want.
Now, I am a bit ambivalent as regard to the fact that I answered your question, as I am not so certain (lately) that being that precise/colorful is something most readers (or a sufficient % of them to make the thing not so much of a great idea) wonât rather see as mere undecipherable/pointless/useless complexity.
One thing thatâs for sure though: once you grasp how punctuation is potentially a âlanguageâ in itself, once you played with it and had fun, it is quite hard to simply go âHey, the heck. â I just wonât use it.â
The black cat (Edgar Allan Poe):
One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; â hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; â hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; â hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin â a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it â if such a thing were possible â even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe):
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening; â just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
Well I guess it is time consuming for many as well. After all, weâre living in a rat race were no one has time to do anything other than their work. This is not really true, though. People want quick satisfaction and gratification whenever they can. Watching Tikok videos that are barely 50 seconds long and scrolling through Instagram for pictures, and so on. I think it is known to many of us we tend to like to see pictures or images more than words (less brain power required here).
âBiggestâ books in terms of number of pages in my possession right now would be The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, Gone with the Wind, and The C++ Standard Library book. Some other slightly âsmallerâ books though have smaller font and are more condensed (strains my eyesâŠugh).
I can also assume that most people donât like to commit their time to one particular book or storyline. Instead, they want many quick to read stories for some light entertainment.
From a historical perspective, people in the previous century could either watch films, listen to vinyl records or radio, or read a book. Watching films in cinemas was partially a luxury till T.V. shows came in the 50s. But still, it wasnât a cheap form entertainment. Buying vinyl records wasnât cheap either and storing many records can become an issue. One of the simplest, centuries old pass time readily available would be reading a book. Hence, people were more literate in the 20th century.
Our standards for literacy and writing have decreased over the years as schools have become more lax. Unless youâre rich enough to send your kids to a private school. This isnât the case for most parents. Why bother pay so much for education when public school education is free, right? But it has a strong impact on the childâs educational growth. This can be proven by increasing reports on literacy and numeracy skills in schools dropping increasingly more than before. Faulty education system?
I can conclude that it is a serious chain effect. Poor education quality fueled with unlimited forms of fast entertainment that requires zero brain cells. Communication has reduced down to abbreviated language and slang. Then the market sells books with shorter lengths and much fewer pages. This sort of creates a death spiral loop.
Now no doubt, there are many young and old who continually enjoy to read lengthy books and classics. But the percentage is very small compared to the larger percentage of people who may not even bothering reading anything that is more than 120 words long.
My friends who are visual artists would find this very insulting.
This is not true. In the US, the slavery-driven racial gap in literacy rates only closed in the 1970s, Today, âdevelopedâ countries all have 95% or better literacy, and global literacy continues to rise.
This is also nonsense. Though there was a clear drop in educational achievement associated with the pandemic, both reading and math scores show significant improvements over the long term. Fast Facts: Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement (38)
Shakespeareâs sonnets average about 125 words each. Brevity has always been valued.
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