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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

People often lament the decline in literacy, but the books mentioned in the article demand hundreds or thousands of hours of focused practice to achieve even moderate reading speed and comprehension. These books can be far more rewarding than social media or YouTube, but they are often dense, esoteric, and written in complex sentence structures. Since our brains aren’t naturally wired for reading, developing this skill is a challenging and humbling process. Most people decide it isn’t worth the effort.

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> Since our brains aren’t naturally wired for reading

There's actually some evidence that we are, in fact, naturally wired for reading. The below study, for instance, shows that the area in the brain used for visualizing words seems to be already hooked up to language processing areas in newborns.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75015-7

> Most people decide it isn’t worth the effort

Most people "decide" to not develop their reading skills when they are young children without the ability to understand the long-term implications.

AI tutors might help with this because I think the constraints teachers have make it difficult to foster a love of books in a lot of kids.

When I was growing up, teachers would assign one text for the entire class to read. Sometimes it was a book I enjoyed (like Canticle for Leibowitz) but more often than not it was some book I hated (like Great Gatsby which I reread as an adult and still think it’s terrible). If you really wanted to instill a love of reading and develop skills around reading, you would give students more choice.

My kids had a similar experience so I don’t think much changed between 1985 and 2015. If anything, it’s worse now. It feels like schools do as much as they can to prevent kids from enjoying reading. They were assigned only books they had zero interest in and were given so much homework they had no desire or energy left to read for pleasure.

It took me a long time after high school to start reading for pleasure (thank you Douglas Adams and Michael Ondaatje). I hope it works out for my kids too.

So maybe the problem isn't kids who decide they don't like to read, but voters and taxpayers have decided that they don't want to pay for anything better.

It depends. If the complex sentence structures can be expressed more clearly using simpler structures, I would argue the writer is lacking.

My wife writes a little, but reads a lot. One time she went back and re-read something she had written years ago, and came away thinking "I hate this type of writing! It thinks it's so damn smart!". Her takeaway was this: if you're in love with the way you phrased something, rewrite it.

Hey goal is to write a story with plot. Real characters. Arcs. As soon as she finds herself wasting time rolling sentences around her mouth, like toffee, with big fancy words, she is directly hurting the readers' flow. Sometimes it's nice to leave one or two, but in general you shouldn't try to be in love with every sentence you've written. But every sentence should move the story forward. Just tell the damn story. Because when you come back to your writing years later, it's those very stylish, witty, fancy phrases that will embarrass you.

I think this speaks to a common misunderstanding of ‘literary’ fiction vs. ‘genre’ fiction - the former is typically more character- or idea-driven, while the latter is story/plot driven.

I’m not making the argument that one is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other; rather that their goals are different.

I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.

> I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.

It's funny to me that that line by O’Connor is both good writing and good business, at least in that it reduces competition with their own works. Furthermore, making quotable quips is the best kind of publicity for your writing you can do for free as an author. I wonder how many MFA programs are so explicit about the dismal prospects of writing as a livelihood or career, not that it was ever much better in the past. Arguably, it's easier than ever to get paid as an independent writer, but that doesn't make it any easier to make a decent living exclusively from one's published output.

Found the citation:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill_one%27s_darlings

> A piece of advice to prospective authors that they must kill their “darlings”, i.e. suppress overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. Often attributed to William Faulkner (1897–1962), but already expressed earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch (murder one's darlings); more recently popularized by Stephen King.

Was it intentional that you used the phrase “rolling sentences around her mouth, like toffee” in a post about how it’s better to write plainly?

Yes. Well done!

Having said that, I don't think it's good policy to remove everything, down to the point where you have: Mary came in. She saw John. John saw her too. Mary said "Well, what now?". John replied "I don't know"

Sometimes it's hilarious to describe the body language and internal monologue of a particularly awful character, and sometimes it feels pushed.

Thank god I'm not a writer. It's hard enough writing something that passes a linters / CI tests and works in production without adding "how does it make you feel to read it?". Code is written to run on machines. That's is function. But it should be written to be understandable and maintainable to humans as a secondary goal. But taking a human, making them laugh, making them cry and changing their life? I wouldn't know where to start.

But oddly, I re-read my own post and now I have a strange desire to find out what happened between Mary and John.

2026: Ground breaking novel by raffraffraff, "The thing that occurred between John and Mary"

william faulkner would like a word

Sometimes the writing itself is a guide for the mind of the reader, and the indirect path prose can take is part of the message.

Not everything has to be written in digestible snippets of text.

The thing is- it often isn‘t (worth it) until you can put things in context and even then it is not a given you will be rewarded. I stopped reading to forcefully educate myself and just read for entertainment. Turns out I read much more and even found many more great books i want to read.

reading this whole debate in this thread, i thought: "literary fiction writers should not be worried about ai because tech ppl don't like prose"

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