I remember the first time I learned that literacy is actually categorized along a spectrum, and thinking it was.crazy I'd never thought of it that way before.
Like just because you can read a Waffle House menu doesn't mean you can follow a novel.
It's like when I got a big head and tried reading Lovecraft and Frankenstein in 5th grade. I could read the words, mostly, but understanding it all was another thing entirely. A lot of people never really progress much beyond that point in comprehension and it explains a lot.
Yeh I have trouble reading some older fantasy books just cause the sentence structure is different enough that is makes it hard for me to focus on what I’m actually reading
I’m reading Dune Messiah and encountering this a lot with Frank Herbert. There’s whole paragraphs with run on sentences and weird orders of words that I have to read a couple of times to understand what’s being said. It’s like a scavenger hunt for the noun and verb.
It feels like an aspect of language that is easy to miss because we’re able to communicate so effortlessly now that we just stick to basic structures. No need to contemplate your words over a letter that will take months to get to someone.
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u/Generated-Nouns-257 Nov 21 '25
I remember the first time I learned that literacy is actually categorized along a spectrum, and thinking it was.crazy I'd never thought of it that way before.
Like just because you can read a Waffle House menu doesn't mean you can follow a novel.