musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Call me a fool; trust not my reading nor my observations


Lately -well, since I retired anyway- I’ve been noticing that I’m not retaining as much when I read; I find that I often have to re-read a paragraph to make sense of it: sometimes, the tense seems incorrect, sometimes a name I’ve just read escapes me; and occasionally I skip parts of sentences like words, or punctuation as if they didn’t really matter for whatever the article was purporting to disclose. Of course, nowadays I’m often just reading for fun anyway, so what the heck, eh?

But it occurred to me that over the  past few years, much of my reading has been done on one form of screen or other; still, I figured that words are words wherever they are displayed. On the screen, I can usually adjust the font, the size, and the luminosity which, except for sitting under a brighter lamp, I could never do with words on paper. Even so, I have to admit that I prefer the physical texture -the smell, the inky permanence- of words actually printed on something that crinkles under my fingers. But my eyes shouldn’t care; the information they take in is the same… isn’t it?

I think that over years of needing to plough through pages and pages of information each day at work, my reading evolved into attempts to maximize the efficiency of the journey along each sheet of paper; concentrating only on words that contained the most salient information seemed to serve the purpose. I don’t think that was something I learned in high school because in the textbooks, there were usually summaries at the end of each chapter serving a similar, but lazy way of assimilating the salient content. In university, though, I found I had to put on my big-boy pants, and learn to skim.

Perhaps nowadays with digital media, though, we depend more on someone else’s summary than our own. And yet Google searches can be rife with inconvenient complexities which can be ignored; questionable sources may find themselves included; and opinions may occasionally be offered as proven and acceptable facts unless a lot of effort is put into fact-checking the original sources. Skimming through opinion-laden results with the lens of critical thinking is sometimes a lot of work.

But I digress, I fear. I don’t think I can blame all of my decreased assimilation on the way it is presented on my phone -I seldom attempt to read long articles on it, and anyway, my fingers are too fat to easily navigate the choices offered on the screen. It may be an Age thing, but my fingers are clumsy on a phone’s QWERTY keyboard.

I think I’m pretty good at reading stories on a screen, though, but if I’m required to remember the names of too many characters to figure out the plot, skimming is of little value because, unlike words which have assigned meanings, the names of people in the story are arbitrary. Movies are easier because I can cheat by remembering the actors’ faces or personalities. Still, I fear these are merely excuses; none of these tricks explain my increasingly inept retention of on-screen articles. On-screen words.

Back in my days in university (when we didn’t have the internet -or computers) I used to underline, or highlight salient information in the books I had to buy for the courses; it wasn’t skimming exactly, but I suppose it served the same purpose: a way of picking out the important information and later retrieving it for exams, or assignments. Anyway it seemed to work.

I know, I know -you can highlight stuff on a screen too, but -at least with my primitive digital skills- only one segment at a time, and it disappears as soon as you highlight another different sentence further in the same document -or it isn’t still marked if you close what you were working on, then re-open it later…  I suppose I could just ask how it’s done from any of the kids giggling in the seats around me on the bus, but they’d probably just look at me with rolled eyes. I hate that.

Anyway, is there really something different about words on a screen and words on a paper page? Or is it usually more the way it is written and simplified for the 10-minute mind span? Or is it 5 minutes? I’ve forgotten already.

It’s likely 5 minutes, though, because I just found a rather short article online that purported to validate the difference between paper and screen retention[i]; I’ll only describe the contents approximately, though, because I may have missed some of its key points, and anyway, it’s already fading in my mind.

‘This shift from reading more traditional books, magazines and newspapers to digital media… has affected how people use information… readers of digital content must exercise critical thinking to sift through the volumes of information at their fingertips.’

And yet why should the manner in which text is displayed be of any consequence for how it is read and understood? Well, one reason might be ‘the screen inferiority effect… This effect refers to demonstrations that – with all else being equal – a text that is read on a digital screen will be less well understood than the same text if it is read on paper… After reading the [online] article, you might be able to accurately answer questions about its gist, but not necessarily be able to report the details as well as if you had read it on paper. The effect has been documented across different languages and writing systems, indicating that it is robust.’

There are caveats however: ‘the comprehension of narrative texts (in which readers become immersed in a story) seems to be less affected by how the text is displayed, compared with the comprehension of expository texts… Another important variable is the amount of time available to read, with the screen inferiority effect being larger when readers are under pressure to read rapidly.’ Like from a phone screen on a noisy bus.

Oh, and ‘the screen inferiority effect may increase readers’ susceptibility to misinformation, making them less likely to notice important discrepancies in the content of a text that is displayed digitally.’ That’s if they can remember the details long enough, I suppose. My favourite explanation, though is that ‘because most digital reading involves the rapid acquisition of information from social media posts, short online news articles and emails, readers fail to appreciate that the more superficial reading that is sufficient to understand the gist of these short, simple texts is insufficient to understand longer, more difficult texts.’

That’s more in line with my problems I think: ‘The screen inferiority effect reflects the misapplication of one reading strategy (the skimming of short, simple texts) to another, inappropriate situation (the reading of longer, more complex texts). Readers who are skimming might, for instance, be ignoring the shorter function words (like ‘a’ and ‘the’) that mostly play grammatical roles, and instead focus their attention on the longer content words that tend to convey the most meaning. Although this skimming strategy might be sufficient to understand the gist of a short text, any information that is lost by ignoring function words would be expected to degrade understanding of longer, more complex texts, where grammatical roles are required to know ‘who did what to whom’.’

Perhaps I have belaboured the obvious point of the article: we need different reading strategies for different media. But despite rereading it several times, it’s still not clear to me why reading on a screen is so different…  

Was it because I was reading it on a screen?

[i]https://psyche.co/ideas/what-does-switching-from-paper-to-screens-mean-for-how-we-read?

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gozzter

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