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by zozbot234
65 days ago
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Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being more literate or exercising more critical thinking: it was simply about slowly recreating in one's mind the kind of broad structural scaffold we now expect to see in a text as a matter of course. It's in fact easier to think critically about a text when its sections and structure are clearly laid out, and having a LLM do this for you is a nice way of avoiding personal tendencies and biases that might lead one to misinterpret what the text is really about. |
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In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.
By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.
This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.
Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.