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by nonrandomstring
1517 days ago
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I wonder if you and I and the sibling commenter are talking about
dyslexia without realising it? I don't know much about it. A friend of
mine has a similarly wired brain. Definitely there's a spectrum from
very language orientated minds to those who greatly prefer picture,
sound and face to face spoken communications. I wonder if smartphones
and iconic interaction are making us all more dyslexic? |
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No. Dyslexia is an actual learning disability, it isn't a lack of skill, aversion, or a missing habit. Dyslexia causes the reader to have difficulty recognizing words by, for example, scrambling letter order, and making it harder to distinguish similar letters (eg. confusing the mirror image letters b and d, or p and q), and similar visual confusion. It has very little to do with an inability to comprehend sentences.
Smartphones have actually increased the amount of text people read and write, but it is true that for most people little of that time is spent on text in longform formats rather than texts, tweets, memes, and shorter blog posts.
Certainly people who don't read and write longer essays and similar documents habitually are less likely to reach for that sort of reading and writing as tools for thought, and may not be as skilled in their use when they do, but that can generally be remedied with practice.
But none of that means that people are 'more dyslexic'.
There are other mental configurations (like ADHD) that make digesting longform text more difficult; those can sometimes be accommodated by using different (generally more atomized) documentation formats instead of continuous longform prose. Atomized formats will generally also help non-habitual readers, non-native speakers, the young, non-experts, and so on.
Of the four documentation types (tutorials, how-tos, explanations, and reference), only one (explanation) will tend to be expressed as longform text, but it doesn't have to be. Shorter explanations, or breaking the document up into shorter passages, is often well worth doing. There is no downside from making documents easier to digest. For the other documentation types, longer passages are a bit of a "smell" that should be eliminated if possible.
As in other contexts, accommodating a broad range of ability in people produces benefits for everyone, including for those who are more able.