Comment by jb1991
3 months ago
People do skip words or scan for key phrases, but reading still happens in sequence. The brain depends on word order and syntax to make sense of text, so you cannot truly read it all at once. Skimming just means you sample parts of a linear structure, not that reading itself is non-linear. Eye-tracking studies confirm this sequential processing (check out the Rayner study in Psychological Bulletin if you are interested).
Thanks for the reference!
Reading is def not 100% linear, as I find myself skipping ahead to see who is talking or what type of sentence I am reading (question, exclamation, statement).
There is an interesting discussion down thread about ADHD and sequential reading. As someone who has ADHD I may be biased by how my brain works. I definitely don't read strictly linearly, there is a lot of jumping around and assembling of text.
> Reading is def not 100% linear, as I find myself skipping ahead to see who is talking or what type of sentence I am reading (question, exclamation, statement).
My initial reaction was to say speak for yourself about what reading is or isn’t, and that text is written linearly, but the more I think about it, the more I think you have a very good point. I think I read mostly linear and don’t often look ahead for punctuation. But sentence punctuation changes both the meaning and presumed tone of words that preceded it, and it’s useful to know that while reading the words. Same goes for something like “, Barry said.” So meaning in written text is definitely not 100% linear, and that justifies reading in non-linear ways. This, I’m sure, is one reason that Spanish has the pre-sentence question mark “¿”. And I think there are some authors who try to put who’s talking in front most of the time, though I can’t name any off the top of my head.
You may very well skip ahead for context, etc, and that is fine, but that doesn't mean you are actually reading out of order. It's one thing to get distracted or interested in other parts of a sentence or paragraph and jump around. But ultimately, if you are actually gathering the meaning that was written, you have to consume the words linearly at some point. Perhaps with ADHD you just have to endure some distractions on the way to doing so.
That's not exactly correct. You can totally read whole sentences or paragraphs at once without having to piece individual words together.
I can give you an analogy that should hopefully help. If you look at a house, you don't look at the doors, windows, facade, roof individually, then ponder how they are related together to come to a conclusion that it is a house. You immediately know. This is similar with reading. It might require practice though (and a lot of reading!).
Your comparison makes no sense to me. Looking at an object and understanding what it is completely different than processing a sequential series of symbols that are designed to have meaning due to a linear order.