scanning

TODAY, I WRITE FOR SCANNERS

Many things have changed in the three decades since I started putting words to paper to earn a living. For one thing, I rarely put words to paper anymore. Sadly, nobody has created an equivalent saying that involves phosphors or pixels. But that’s not the point …

What is the point is that many of those changes have affected the way I write. One of the biggest changes is the result of two factors: an oversupply of information and a paucity of time. Thanks largely to the internet, we face an overwhelming amount of information, and our busier lives mean we have less time to sift through all of it.

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TODAY’S READER IS A SCANNER

Busy, busy, busy. We’re going this way and that way, and it seems that we have less time for everything. That effort to cram more into every day has had a pronounced effect on the way people read. A generation ago, people tended to read at a more leisurely pace. They’d start at the beginning, finish at the end, and savor everything in between.

The shortage of time and the speed of finding information on the internet has fundamentally changed the way people read nearly everything. Instead of savoring, readers are skimming; breezing through articles, books, and documents at a pace that would have been considered speed-reading in the past. They look for what matters in a document, and zero in only on those points that seem to be most important.

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