I’ve often seen Dopers insulting others by saying something like, “You need to read for comprehension!”
It’s a nasty and infantile insult, IMO, but whatever… folks are gonna bitch, especially in the Bitching Zone (the Pit).
But every time I see that I wonder, “why else would you read?” To practice left to right eye movement? To find nifty anagrams? To look busy at work? To admire fonts? Just for yucks?
The insult manages to be deeply demeaning and also nonsensical at the same time. It makes the accuser look like an idiot, not the person it was directed at.
Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning. It relies on two, interconnected abilities: word reading (being able to decode the symbols on the page) and language comprehension (being able to understand the meaning of the words and sentences).
Basically, no shortage of people read without really comprehending what they’re reading depending on the subject. This is especially true of Science and probably law articles.
I can read something like the main aviation thread here and not fully comprehend the jargon or the details of piloting jet aircraft.
Yet I feel I’m “comprehending” what I’m reading just fine. I’m reading it in detail and understanding the thrust (heh) of what is posted.
How can anyone read about complex subjects outside their wheelhouse and not be accused of “not reading for comprehension”?
Do I need to be a physicist before I can comprehend what I read about fairly advanced physics?
I think folks here usually use that insult because they are butt-hurt that someone didnt agree with their point. They are saying in effect, “you didnt agree with my point so you must not be able to read very well.”
ETA: this is not a hill I’m interested in dying on. It’s just something that has always seemed odd to me.
I would choose to say something like, “perhaps you didnt fully understand what i wrote. Let me explain” instead of “try reading for comprehension, you dumbass!!!”
To me it comes off as roughly equivalent to “DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO READ?!?!”
It’s pretty common for a response to clearly miss the point of a post. Not just disagree, but miss something important. That’s what the comment is meant to highlight.
Right, and when this happens, it might be the fault of the writer for not being clear enough, or the fault of the reader for not reading carefully enough, or some combination of the two.
“You need to read for comprehension” clearly implies that it’s the fault of the reader. This is why it can come across as insulting, but sometimes the charge is warranted.
Its also why book reports and essay questions are such an important part of education. If you cannot give a clear explanation in your own words about what you just read or answer a question in a coherent paragraph or two then you really didnt learn anything other than spelling and grammer. That is, you didnt comprehend the subject matter.
If you wanted different responses, you might have phrased your OP differently. It seems to me what you wanted to say was “be more polite”, rather than focusing on the “reading for comprehension” phrase.
I don’t mind reading without comprehending sometimes. For instance, I find Proust’s style soothing (good bedtime reading) even when I don’t know or can’t be bothered to figure out what he’s going on about.
The Big Sleep is another good example. The writing is riveting, even though no one can figure out the plot.
Let’s not assume everyone who tells someone else to ‘read for comprehension’ necessarily wrote anything coherent or truthful or worthwhile. Sometimes people retort that just as a way of saying ‘if you disagree with me after all this, you must be an idiot’.
Which is how you wind up with a defense contractor named after a cursed artifact that bends the will of all those who use it until they become servants of the devil.
Yes, this. they don’t read for comprehension, they read for confirmation bias.
I spent many years arguing with conspiracy theorists online, and they were past masters at this. They’d “read” something, latch on to one or two things they could misrepresent as supporting their CT, and ignore everything else in the article that contradicted them. We could debate whether they were incapable of reading for comprehension, or just unwilling to, but either way, they had no problem reading without comprehending.
A compiler or whatever can read a source code file, compile (or interpret) it, etc. But it doesn’t comprehend it.
New School:
An AI can read text, parse it, make links to it’s data base, etc. But it doesn’t comprehend it.
I have actually read text in a language I really don’t know much. Poetry, esp. old Greek epic poetry or Norse sagas has a meter and such that is interesting to see. Comprehension? Nada.