Importance of Reading

Jeff Attwood is the creator of “Coding Horror”, an online blog that was created in 2004. In his post “Because Reading is Fundamental” Attwood focuses on showing that our quality of communication may be lacking and that this could be an effect of the decrease in reading.

Attwood refers to The Ars Banana experiment to support his argument where a blog by the name of Ars Technica did a piece about “Guns at home are more likely to be used stupidly than for self defense”. They asked their readers that if they had gotten to a certain point within the article to include the word “Banana” in their comment. They found that it took until the 93^rd comment for “Bananas” to be mentioned. This showed that several commentators may have been re plying without reading the full article.

Atwood also referred to an experiment called The Slate Experiment where Farhad Manjoo collected data to show that most readers will only get half-way through an article.

Though both of these pieces of research Attwood found that, “We badly need to incentivize listening.” He says that the online version of listening is reading and proposes some solutions to increase reading and the environments for those reading online.

Attwood suggests that one way to increase reading would be to remove the breaks between pages on an article so that readers can continue without interruption.

The other recommendations that he makes are; to give rewards for reading (especially for longer articles), give estimated read times, and update in real time so that if the author posts an update it will not interrupt the reader from their place but allow them to finish before they get to it.

Attwood’s post is directed towards his primary audience of engineers, content creators, and designers, gamers, and coders; individuals who have completed high school and could be in a post-secondary institution. You can see this as his ads in his widgets section says, “Design course mentor”, “Senior software engineer data pipeline”, and the vocabulary he uses is catered to those with a high school diploma or more.

His points are well supported and could make a difference in the numbers of individuals who read and improve the experience of reading online. These suggestions could be tested within high school groups to see the effectiveness and outcome, and should they have a positive effect would lead to a larger interest in reading at a younger age.