Adam Kotsko: I wrote an article for Slate about the sharp and sudden decline in reading skill among college students:

I wrote an article for Slate about the sharp and sudden decline in reading skill among college students:

College Students Don’t Know How to Read Anymore. We’re in Denial Over How Bad It’s Gotten.slate.com These kids aren’t lazy. We’re failing them.

If you liked this article, you may also like my follow-up blog post on the decline in information access more broadly:

The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesisitself.blog This morning I published an article on Slate about the decline of reading comprehension and resilience among college-age students. In the piece, I try to defuse the knee-jerk reaction that I must be i...

this is v good & made me remember norbert wiener, who said something to the effect of "the assumptions made before running an experiment are more interesting than the results;" thinking how there's an unstated assumption of informatization of search that "an answer" even exists in the first place

norbert wiener also said "there are no answers, only cross-references" which is perhaps even more applicable in the current context.

I am 67. I was a terrible writer when I entered college. Probably still am, but I had very little analytical reading or writing while in school. It was rote memorization and regurgitation. I'm sure you are seeing it, but I do wonder if it's new. It echoes "What's wrong with kids these days".

I anticipate that response explicitly in the article.

And I'm sorry that I did not read it before responding. I have a terrible time focusing on words as ads pop up. It's a me problem, and I can't afford more subs. My apologies.

I absolutely hear that. One thing I’ve found that helps me a lot is using the ‘reader’ mode in my browser (I use Safari but I think other browsers have similar functionality). It doesn’t work everywhere but when it does (and it did for me for this article) it’s great.

Wow is all I can say about learning of Reader Mode. Just read the article without distractions. Thank you!

The issue of "book reviews instead of books" from my academic library search drives me nuts. I haven't really tried to see if I could work around it though. Excluding "review" might exclude positive results, excluding "book review" might leave too many false positives.

As someone who used to work for one of the main academic library search providers, I can confirm that the mindset that Adam describes is why they haven't bothered to actually deal with this problem. The people designing the search aren't readers, so they simply don't see it as a pressing issue.

Fantastic article. I had no idea there were actual studies showing that reading a physical book translates to a better memory of the book when compared to other formats. Though, that is something that I intuited, as you mentioned in the article. Thank you for sharing!

Not gonna lie, what’s identified in the Slate article and blog post is a small part of the reason I do not teach anymore. Well done.

Thank you for this. This is my 32nd year in academia (22 as a secondary ELA teacher and 10.5 in higher Ed English and English education). It is especially noted that students struggle with dense or complex material.

"there is nothing outside the text": turns out theory can be useful for improving practice.

Is there a standard source of statistics on Americans’ reading ability/habits that you know of? I assume it is difficult to track and quantify, but there must be some orgs that try.

these are good and thought-provoking pieces, but as a nitpick: the body text on itself.blog seems really light? I find myself straining my eyes to read it. looks like the current text color is #666 which on the pure white background meets accessibility guidelines. I hope my eyes aren't going!

(I don't know if you even run the blog or have any say in the text color. if you don't, you may disregard :)

I do run it and have gotten a couple stray complaints over the years. I will look into changing it

My experience teaching this fall was so alarming that I sent an email to a dean outlining the precipitous decline in student writing ability I’ve seen and asking that the university find a way to intervene beyond offering the services of the writing center.

They have some "exciting" "ideas" involving AI, I'm sure.

Exactly. We were recently told about “grammarly” which is being piloted on our campus. www.grammarly.com

The problem is wayyy beyond grammar (though that's an issue as well). I teach some master's level courses here and there and it's pretty shocking how little understanding there is of the simple idea of providing a thesis statement and sticking to that prompt. I get dizzy trying to follow some papers

Very disturbing. I notice things like inability (or lack of motivation) to write complete sentences, use punctuation, break concepts up into paragraphs, etc.

Personally, I think if we spent less time doing pearl clutch grammar in schools, we could focus on simply achieving clarity. Complete sentences are not always required to convey meaning. Paragraphs are always helpful. Every kid has limited bandwidth, if everything is important, nothing is.

This isn't about motivation, its about experience. If you're not consistently reading long passages you're not going to naturally understand paragraph breaks (which are really for the convenience of the reader). The same is true of punctuation. These aren't skills they're regularly using. 1/2

Grammarly isn’t just a grammar checker. It’s an “AI Writing partner.”

When did this happen?

Oh good god

Could this be remedied by practice? I love to write, but I haven't written anything even close to a college paper in ages.

Right, they need practice, but they also need a way to retrofit their reading technique so they can sound out unfamiliar words!

That's the only remedy

When i was in school, we were expressly forbidden from using grammar checkers in english class. They make people lazy

My boss tells me not just to let students use grammarly but to tell them to use it!

That's wild. It's just like using spell check. They won't ever have to learn grammar because they have a grammer checker. When i was in school, the teacher was the one who checked if our grammer was correct.

Grammarly actually is great though.

grammerly is ained at high school students. our profs recommend it, then they come to the writing center wondering why grammerly alerted them to 75% false negatives & false positives. garbage

it is wildly inappropriate for academic writing

It was mandated on our hs campus this fall that we start thinking about positive ways to implement AI writing into our classrooms and curriculums.

I don’t know if this strategy will work for you, but we’ve started using it in class to show why and how it isn’t adequate. So, for example, we’ll plug in an assignment and then go through how the response is vague, off topic, passive, objectively wrong, etc. with the students.

That’s a good idea. Honestly at my school this mandate got about as much follow through as most other administrative mandates (almost none) so I’ve pretty much just ignored it.

I think higher ed needs to figure out the appropriate uses of AI writing (if there are any) immediately so as to be consistent on teaching students when NOT to use it. Students are using it to write paragraphs and code already and it's hard to explain why they shouldn't when higher ed leaders (1/2)

breathlessly talk about how exciting AI is and how it's going to ~change the world. Even if it's in the syllabus the WHY it's unacceptable is not always explained. (2/2)

agh sorry I threaded this in the wrong place -- not meant as direct reply to your comment about HS curriculum. Although, we face the same struggle.

I've heard that 'solution' a lot too 😂 That and 'gamify' 🤮

And John Warner's @biblioracle.bsky.social "Why They Can't Write" offers analysis of the issue and recommendations based on experience teaching writing at college level and latest research. Warner's thesis even points toward a way for handling ChatGPT and similar tech.

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