### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/101 "2014-10-05T22:46:47Z")
> [@Happy\_Lendervedder](#):
>
> I think it’s great. For years, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the follow up to “How is babby formed?”
Let us not forget “what cities have the most promiscuity girls”
---
### Author:  [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/102 "2014-10-05T22:49:03Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#):
>
> Oh, absolutely. It’s because of my world-class intellect that I’m able to parse “y r u” into language that the feeble minds of the mundanes would recognize. I’m trying to impress you with my ability to decrypt what fucking concept could possibly be abstractly connoted by “butterflys.” That’s what I’m after.
lol
\
---
### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/103 "2014-10-05T23:03:27Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#):
>
> The thing is, the better people are at things, the more difficult things they should be able to do with ease. So when people seem to be making the argument that a passage is so poorly written that they, superior readers, can’t read it, it’s odd. Poor readers should suffer more than superior ones do.
I think **Mangetout** ’s post above ([#89](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17789625&postcount=89)) speaks to that: It’s not that “superior readers” have more difficulty reading passages like the one in the OP; it’s that they experience a _greater gap_ in difficulty between that and what they’re used to reading. At least, that’s the theory that seems reasonable to me.
---
### Author:  [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/104 "2014-10-05T23:09:38Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#):
>
> I was joking earlier, but now I’m seriously curious. Have you ever read _Flowers for Algernon_? Because I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s incomprehensible or even moderately difficult. It’s rated as barely above Harry Potter in reading level. Here is a bit from early on:
>
> The thing is, the better people are at things, the more difficult things they should be able to do with ease. So when people seem to be making the argument that a passage is so poorly written that they, superior readers, can’t read it, it’s odd. Poor readers should suffer more than superior ones do.
I was able to read that passage with no difficulty and found it easy to understand. It had misspelled words, but they were complete words and there were complete sentences. I could almost hear the character speaking in my head. The post from the other thread comes nowhere close in clarity. It is not an instance of poor reading, it is poor writing. It had incomplete words and sentences separated by ellipses, for example. If I were grading them, I’d give Charlie a B-. Inf3rno would get a D from me.
Yes, I realize _Flowers For Algernon_ is a work of literature and the language is a deliberate choice of style by the author. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Charlie is a flesh-and blood poster here on the Dope.
---
### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/105 "2014-10-05T23:13:27Z")
So lately i have been getting butterflys in my tummy when i see my manager or he touches ne in any way…
So lately I have been getting butterflies in my tummy when I see my manager or he touches me in any way.
I jever had a thing for him in past 2 years and bow suddenly i am head over heels for him… it started out coz f him… he started looking
I never had a thing for him in the past 2 years and now suddenly I am head over heels for him… it started out because of him… he started looking
Corrected version of the first two lines with corrections in red. Seriously, that’s not a lot of correcting that was needed.
---
### Author:  [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Do_Not_Taunt)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/106 "2014-10-05T23:15:01Z")
> [@bldysabba](#):
>
> Are you seriously saying that if it took you 5 minutes(say) to read and understand the regular passage, it would take you between 15 and 20 minutes to read this one?
Yes. It only seems odd to you because of course it didn’t take 15-20 minutes to read the original passage. It probably took about 2 minutes. My claim is that I could have read the correctly structured passage in 30-40 seconds.
The Flowers For Algernon passage was way easier to read. Midway between: I recently reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Jim’s (the slave) manner of speaking was very difficult at first - on order with the OP. At first. By the time I got to about the half-way point of the book, my brain had adjusted, and I was able to read his parts with only something like a 10-20% speed penalty.
---
### Author:  [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Do_Not_Taunt)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/107 "2014-10-05T23:19:33Z")
Since it looks like the interesting portions of this afternoon’s football games has ended, I took advantage of the opportunity to put some undivided attention to it and actually timed myself reading the [OP](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17780097#post17780097). 1:48. YMMV.
---
### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/108 "2014-10-05T23:19:55Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#):
>
> I was joking earlier, but now I’m seriously curious. Have you ever read _Flowers for Algernon_? Because I’ve never heard anyone claim that it’s incomprehensible or even moderately difficult.
Yes - and as the language gradually degraded, my speed of reading it progressively slowed. I have the same trouble (if it may properly be called that) with passages in books where the author attempts to depict a specific accent in text. - it snaps me out of unconscious reading and I have to read by deliberate conscious process.
> [@](#):
>
> The thing is, the better people are at things, the more difficult things they should be able to do with ease. So when people seem to be making the argument that a passage is so poorly written that they, superior readers, can’t read it, it’s odd. Poor readers should suffer more than superior ones do.
No, I think the absolute opposite is true. Poor readers (in the extreme) would be spelling out words letter by letter - a process that still works well on mangled text.
By way of analogy, consider typing. I don’t think about the keys I’m pressing - I just think the words and my fingers make the text appear on the computer - if you change the layout of my keyboard, it will significantly disrupt my ability to type, whereas a slow hunt-and-peck keyboard user would not be similarly affected.
---
### Author:  [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/109 "2014-10-05T23:26:41Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> So lately i have been getting butterflys in my tummy when i see my manager or he touches ne in any way…
> So lately I have been getting butterflies in my tummy when I see my manager or he touches me in any way.
> I jever had a thing for him in past 2 years and bow suddenly i am head over heels for him… it started out coz f him… he started looking
> I never had a thing for him in the past 2 years and now suddenly I am head over heels for him… it started out because of him… he started looking
>
> Corrected version of the first two lines with corrections in red. Seriously, that’s not a lot of correcting that was needed.
Seriously, I read
> [@](#):
>
> it started out coz f him.
as “it started out because _fuck_ him.” I would never have made the connection between “f” and “of.” Maybe I need to get my mind out of the gutter. 😃
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2014, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/110 "2014-10-05T23:33:34Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> So lately i have been getting butterflys in my tummy when i see my manager or he touches ne in any way…
> So lately I have been getting butterflies in my tummy when I see my manager or he touches me in any way.
> I jever had a thing for him in past 2 years and bow suddenly i am head over heels for him… it started out coz f him… he started looking
> I never had a thing for him in the past 2 years and now suddenly I am head over heels for him… it started out because of him… he started looking
>
> Corrected version of the first two lines with corrections in red. Seriously, that’s not a lot of correcting that was needed.
Those aren’t the only problems with the passage though. Wall Of Text and weirdly rambling sentences are also factors.
---
### Author:  [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/111 "2014-10-06T00:02:45Z")
> [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](#):
>
> Since it looks like the interesting portions of this afternoon’s football games has ended, I took advantage of the opportunity to put some undivided attention to it and actually timed myself reading the [OP](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17780097#post17780097). 1:48. YMMV.
The OP took me ~1:05(my phone alarm went off in the middle, so accurate timing couldn’t happen), and the corrected version posted by Nametag took 57 seconds. Of course it’s 5 AM in India, and I’d already read the OP before, so none of this counts for anything. If we can pony up some people who haven’t read either, randomly select two groups, give one to each, and measure the difference, we ought to have a reasonable estimate 🙂
---
### Author:  [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/112 "2014-10-06T00:03:45Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> Yes - and as the language gradually degraded, my speed of reading it progressively slowed.
I quoted a passage from the beginning of the book. That’s as degraded as it got.
---
### Author:  [@joyfool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joyfool)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/113 "2014-10-06T00:28:02Z")
> [@Jimmy\_Chitwood](#):
>
> This has nothing to do with whether or not you have to solve a fucking puzzle if you don’t want to, which is what **bldysabba** just said above. It has nothing to do with the reward that awaits you. It’s a question about how hard it is to read, if you read it.
>
> More than half of the people voting in the poll have claimed that the post takes considerable effort or more to read, whether or not they actually are willing to do it. Meanwhile, it does not, in fact, require considerable effort. Everyone is pretending that it does because they want to belittle the OP of the thread, or at least for those people’s sakes I hope they are. If it takes anyone considerable effort to read it, that’s fairly surprising. Anyone who is genuinely applying “extreme” effort to the problem, or who finds it incomprehensible even with extreme effort (which a bunch of people have said describes them) has a problem in their brain.
Who wants to insult who?
I didn’t find it horrific, but it got a bit odder as it went along. Initially, there weren’t as many text speak contractions, so applying meaning around the misspellings and typos wasn’t very difficult. However, by the end where the author had abandoned any attempt at regular typing, it got harder. Oh, my 46 year old brain could parse it, but because I don’t typically read stuff like that, it took a nano second here or there to figure it out. Pile that up enough, and although I understood each word, I’d lose the overall meaning and have to backtrack. Sadly, I didn’t realize how much until someone re-wrote it without l33t, proper punctuation and paragraph breaks. Only then did it dawn on me that I’d missed the tail end of the story.
Now, I have no desire to denigrate the OP of that thread, as the ship has long since sailed where it bothers me if others don’t capitalize or the like. So, you all can take that for what you think it’s worth. But I do think those who are more accustomed to it have an easier time with things like that and should understand that not everyone is in the same position.
Also, as a side question, why did the author begin using TH words, but then degrade to substituting Ds? I know I counted at least two correct spellings before the change, and maybe there was three, but if this was their normal way of conversing, I’m not grokking why it started one way then switched to another. Thoughts?
---
### Author:  [@Baal\_Houtham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baal_Houtham)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/114 "2014-10-06T00:29:09Z")
> [@Kamino\_Neko](#):
>
> Difficulty in comprehending - minimal.
> Difficulty in plowing through - extreme.
>
> It’s the tl;dr that made it hard to read, not any issue in understanding it.
This. +1. That’s my take.
I didn’t vote in the poll because the big issue wasn’t comprehension, it was tedium. In the time spent wading through that post I could jump to the responses and read 12 posts that would be more informative and entertaining.
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/115 "2014-10-06T00:29:27Z")
> [@Mangetout](#):
>
> Those aren’t the only problems with the passage though. Wall Of Text and weirdly rambling sentences are also factors.
That’s not a wall of text. Missing a few paragraph breaks, maybe, but not a wall of text.
[This is a wall of text.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16740321&postcount=367)
---
### Author:  [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Do_Not_Taunt)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/116 "2014-10-06T01:11:51Z")
> [@bldysabba](#):
>
> The OP took me ~1:05(my phone alarm went off in the middle, so accurate timing couldn’t happen), and the corrected version posted by Nametag took 57 seconds. Of course it’s 5 AM in India, and I’d already read the OP before, so none of this counts for anything. If we can pony up some people who haven’t read either, randomly select two groups, give one to each, and measure the difference, we ought to have a reasonable estimate 🙂
Huh. I didn’t even notice that **Nametag** had provided a [rewrite](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17782820&postcount=47). That took me 0:52, which means just over a 50% improvement. Now there are all kinds of flaws you can find in that methodology, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but it’s a data point. Also: I’m amazed that it took me significantly longer to read the OP, but I read the rewrite faster than you did.
---
### Author:  [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/117 "2014-10-06T01:47:36Z")
Here’s my take on the OP. It was difficult for me to read. I had to take time to decipher the misspellings/text speak and there was the lack of paragraph breaks. Then sometimes I had to rearrange the words into an understandable sentence. And after all that, what did I end up with?
I felt I was being assaulted by a 15 year old girl’s teen angst about the crush she has on her 20 year old manager. And I felt cheated after going through that work to make sense of the post just to find out that the topic was nonsense. Well, maybe it wouldn’t have been nonsense to me if I was 14 years old, but that ship sailed a LONG time ago.
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### Author:  [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/118 "2014-10-06T01:54:36Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#):
>
> I think **Mangetout** ’s post above ([#89](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17789625&postcount=89)) speaks to that: It’s not that “superior readers” have more difficulty reading passages like the one in the OP; it’s that they experience a _greater gap_ in difficulty between that and what they’re used to reading. At least, that’s the theory that seems reasonable to me.
This seems to be an argument that better readers are worse at reading things than worse readers are.
Is the passage harder to read than perfectly standard text? Absolutely. It’s ignoring some of the conventions we’re used to. But just because we get impatient with it (and I would definitely get impatient with it) doesn’t mean we couldn’t answer with 99% certainty if someone asked us what it said.
And if we can answer with that sort of certainty (or anything approaching it), then it’s not incomprehensible.
---
### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/119 "2014-10-06T05:44:18Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#):
>
> This seems to be an argument that better readers are worse at reading things than worse readers are.
No, and I have explained this. People for whom the process of reading standard English is an unconscious activity, may find challenges like this one more disruptive than people who are in conscious supervision of their own process of reading.
I don’t think it’s useful to use the terms ‘better’ and ‘worse’ without qualifiers here. I’m faster at reading well-formed standard English than many other people (and that’s just the way it works. I’m not doing it to show off), but for text that deviates from standard English, I may be forced to use an entirely different mental technique to read it, at which I am not very fluent.
This particular case was made more acute by the fact that, although the actual proportion of disruption was small, it was peppered throughout the passage - I can only describe the effect (for me) as like driving in stop-start traffic. Every time it felt like things were moving again, it was time to jam on the brakes.
---
### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/120 "2014-10-06T05:47:37Z")
I don’t think anyone is arguing that it might be somewhat more difficult to read than standard English, but “virtually incomprehensible”? No.
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