Skimming

Have you ever written a blog post and wondered if people actually read every single word of it before they like, or comment on it? I do, all the time.

Especially when I post something that is close to 1000 words in length and less than two minutes later I have a notification saying someone has liked my post. Honestly, that kind of offends me.

Then again, I don’t know what the person on the other end is thinking. For me, sometimes I like a post after reading something really good in the second paragraph. What they said was either really funny, or just made me nod my head so much that I couldn’t hold back on pressing like.

Granted, when that happens, I still finish reading the rest of the post because surely it was just that good.

I don’t know if other people do that. I feel like there is a whole lot of skimming going on. And it’s normally reflected in some of the comments people make on my posts.

Or sometimes a post is just so long that people skim through it and try to pick up on big words. Or they only read the short paragraphs and forget about the long ones. Because who likes reading a long paragraph? They go on, and on, and on, forever until the person reading is just too intimidated by a huge block of text and decides to skip over it. Maybe they just skip some sentences, or some lines in the long paragraph. We’ve all done it haven’t we? Skipping over text to get to shorter paragraphs. There is a sense of comfort in short paragraphs. I don’t know why. Maybe we’re all in a hurry and just want to finish reading and get to the climax of the post, or book, or website, or whatever else we might be reading. A big block of text is sometimes like every page after the first page of results on Google. It’s there, but no one ever looks at it. Poor, Google. So many results, so few get looked at. Using one word, tell me your favourite colour in the comments below and nothing else. But sometimes a big block of text can have something important in it and people don’t even know, because they’ve skipped it. It was too long. It wasn’t worth their time. They didn’t want to read it, just like they didn’t want to click on page two of Google for results. It’s sad, really. I mean, words are words. It shouldn’t matter if they’re broken up in paragraphs or huddled all together. My high school English teacher always told my class to “let every word tell”. That’s something I remind myself every time I write. It helps eliminate the useless words and makes every word meaningful. And I think that’s important. Every word should matter.

Alright, that was a pretty long paragraph. If you skipped over it, I don’t blame you. You didn’t miss much, really.

In school, when they gave us time to read, you could always tell who the fast readers were. They were the ones flipping the page, while you were only at the half way mark. And then you got self-conscious. Am I a slow reader? Do I have a learning disability? Or are they just speed reading?

Regardless, I knew I didn’t miss anything. That I read every word. That I didn’t miss any specific instructions. I can only hope there are others that are the same way.

Well, I’ve said enough.

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