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?
I don’t approve of English being written like that. Are you implying that I (or people in general) should approve of it? Because that would just be weird.
There are all kinds of small mundane annoyances I could be said to disapprove of - a small sharp piece of gravel in my shoe when walking. Being dazzled by a badly adjusted car headlight. The smell of a burning sofa in my neighbour’s garden. A greasy smudge on the lens of my glasses - and so on. It’s not abnormal to disapprove of that which is annoying.
Well, I disapprove of the style because I technically find it hard to read, not out of a lack of desire to “appreciate” it.
Edit: @ John Mace.
Incomprehensible, but more because I refuse to make the effort to understand it. If you can’t communicate clearly on a message board, you shouldn’t communicate at all. The post cited in the OP doesn’t say “ESL” to me - it says “I’m an illiterate moron.”
No. Why would you think that?
There is simply no way that a native English speaker who can read and write English would find that OP to be “virtually incomprehensible”.
Because the more they’ve deviated from our expectations, the more like a piece of shit we can treat the other person. Same reason we say somebody has made us ten minutes late when they delay us in traffic for 30 seconds. We’re talking about mentally substituting “th” for “d” and inserting a bunch of omitted vowels. That’s about 90% of the difficulty in reading that post.
If we acknowledge that we can do that with only a slight effort, well, then we look like a bunch of assholes if the first like seven posts are all jokes about how incomprehensible her post was, don’t we?
For someone who desires clear communication, you’re certainly willing to play fast and loose with the meaning of incomprehensible.
And if I thought it was easy I wouldn’t have made a point of how difficult I thought it was to read. I would have said I thought it was easy and not worried about looking like an asshole. But you go ahead and keep ascribing ulterior motives to me if it jibes with your line of reasoning.
Edit: @ Jimmy Chitwood.
Is that really surprising? I’d say that my reading speed for the OP of the thread in question was reduced quite significantly - because it required me to perform the process of reading consciously and deliberately.
I’m normally a fast reader. I’m not normally aware of the detailed process by which the words on the page end up in my mind - it just happens - fluently and transparently.
In this particular rendering of the text (and only because of unfamiliarity), I found myself having to consciously drive the process of understanding the text - it’s not exactly right to say this is difficult - it’s just different, and considerably slower.
I’ve no doubt that with sufficient practice and exposure, I’d achieve the same fluency of reading for other renderings of English - but I don’t have any real reason for that to happen at the moment.
I’m sure many people would say how difficult it was, just to be mean. I think it would be unusual for someone who is fluent in written English not to be able to make sense of the passage with pretty minimal effort. Our literacy informs how we read. The more literate we are, the easier we should generally find it to fill in the gaps in what we are reading. We then read on two different levels–what we are reading, and what we are filling in from our vast experience with English.
So, when someone who is fluent in written English can’t bridge those two layers, that does strike me as very weird, especially on a board where every other person claims to have a genius IQ and to have been reading since before birth.
I don’t know, because I now don’t understand why you mentioned disapproval at all? Why did you mention disapproval?
I think some people in this thread are unable or unwilling to accept that others sincerely have different interpretations of things than they do. English is my first (and only) language, but I am not fluent in technical or medical English terms, for example, but I am fluent in everyday conversational English. I might become familiar with more technical types of English with some effort if I had an incentive to do so. I am surprised by other people’s surprise that not everybody finds the post in question to be simple to read. It is not conversational English and not all of us have the same experience of encountering the kind of English used in the OP. It is not a failure of my literacy in English.
We’ve got that sort of thing in this thread - it’s just happens to be manifest in the form of surprise at how some people found it difficult.
Because lots of people clearly disapprove of that style. Did you read the first 20 or so posts in this thread? Or the first 20 or so in the original thread?
I think a native speaker who claims it was “virtually incomprehensible” is actually voicing disapproval of the style rather than accurately describing the experience of reading it. My parents used to say that Rock 'n Roll was “noise, not music”. But that’s because they disapproved of it.
I think it’s great. For years, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the follow up to “How is babby formed?”
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.
Straight Dope. What a place.
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 don’t think the two things are mutually exclusive. People disapprove because of the experience of reading it.
Yes, and while the experience might be unpleasant, it can’t accurately be called “virtually incomprehensible”.
That might be called virtually incomprehensible.
That was incomprehensible, but legible. The thread in question was a bit more the other way. I think the wall of text effect contributed negatively to both legibility and comprehensibility though.
It was incomprehensible to me because I gave up bothering to read it pretty early on - so comprehension was not a milestone that I reached.