If someone is trying to convey important information, I'd rather get an email, than a text. And, I'd rather get a text than a voice call.

Writing requires thought to form sentence that make sense. And, forces the person to slow down a bit and gives them time to think about what they are staying. Also, they at least have the opportunity to read before they send, to check if they left anything out. Finally, and this is especially important in business, we have a "paper trail" that can be referred back to.

It took me years to stop the owner of the business I worked for to stop giving me instructions verbally. He did end-runs around shop policy to get his own pet projects prioritized. Policies that he put into place. Why do business owners sabotage their own businesses?

That is so crazy for me on a personal level because I'm the exact opposite. My brain has a really hard time processing auditory instructions.

If only everyone recorded personal logs like in Star Trek you could have just bequeathed him those! On a serious note though, good on them for trying to learn and expand their knowledge even with some sort of learning disability. I was diagnosed with ADHD like 30 years ago and I understand how troubling it can be trying to read things while constantly having to re-read sentences because you spaced out, or having to keep 5 browser tabs open because each new section brings up some other topic that I now need. I describe my learning/throught process as a spider web for good reason.

Something else I forgot to mention was a concept that I learned in the military called BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. The idea is that most people aren't going to read past the first sentence or two before skipping to the end so you better get the absolutely critical information out right away; before your reader gets bored/decides they have more pressing matters to deal with. I would regularly see emails that started with a summary before even the salutations.

Shhhh, that would require actual understanding of the culture and not just laziness.

He looks absolutely enthralled by the wall of text lol.

You can still enjoy reading if you have aphantasia. I can't picture shit, but verbose books tend to be my favourites.

Have you ever done any sort of IT support? I was internal IT in my first job and we had those people. It was mostly women 50+ years old who were proud that they know nothing about computers and would actively avoid listening when I tried to tell them how to do something trivial. Even when it was part of their jobs to do it. Then they would ask for help with the same stupid shit a few weeks later.

Highschool bullies are just a grown up version of middle school bullies. That shit was supposed to stop there.

Not only is he trying, he laments not learning better when he was younger. Great self-awareness, and taking ownership today.

He is an obese man in the gym. Literally nothing more admirable than someone improving themselves.

When I was in the US Air Force, I was deployed to a US Marine camp once, and listening to those guys chat among themselves was always a treat. You never knew what dumbass comments were going to come out of their mouths.

One day, one of the young corporals mentioned that, while traveling to another base, he got stuck waiting for a connecting flight between bases for about a week and he was so bored, he read A BOOK. He stressed the fact that he's never read an entire book from cover to cover before, but he did on this layover because he was so extremely bored.

To my surprise, the other Marines just nodded along, like this made perfect sense to them. Not a single person harassed him for never reading a book before (and they harass each other all the time for the simplest things).

I mean, we poke fun at Marines for being dumb. They call themselves jarheads, which is an allusion to the fact that their heads are as empty as a jar. But it still blows my mind to hear the dumb things they say sometimes.

I heard schools have largely moved away from Phonics, which is wild to me. That's basically how reading was taught going back to at least medieval monks.

I hear they're using a "look and see" method or something? Word is that its how the Chinese teach their students to read....but they don't have an alphabet, so I don't know how that's supposed to work in English.

I have a relative who just retired from teaching and she says its a real mess in early education because of how badly this reading teaching method works, and its only worsening as students mature.

remember that 56% of Americans read at a 6th-grade level or above; the rest read below that.

It's a book with chapters. Basically a regular ass book. When kids are real little, their books are like 15 pages long. Then in like 1st or 2nd grade, they move onto reading big kid books - aka "chapter books" that have enough pages to warrant chapters.

You never hear someone over the age of 7 or 8 mention reading "chapter books" because they're just know as books.

Except anon, who is dumb as fuck.

A book.

Most adults just call them ‘books’. But in case you want more, it’s a book with chapters like “Chapter 1 - in the beginning’ and so on. Very few pictures, lots of words. in the US, youth call them chapter books because it’s a moment of transition from reading short simple stories to books more than 100 pages long.

If you do the chapter crime, you do the chapter time. Chapter book ‘im, Dan-o.