The Lost Art of Reading Long Form
Do people read blogs again?
“People don’t read again”, that was my friends response 3 years ago when I suggested she started blogging as a way to share her writing. Even as I said it to her, I knew it was a long shot. I’d probably be the only one to read her blog, maybe two people if you included her mum. As photo and video sharing apps evolved, long form bloggers pivoted to creating YouTube videos or short form videos and pictures on Instagram , while people like myself gave up blogging and reading blogs altogether.
Most of us swapped long form reading for doom scrolling and reading started dwindling. In nearly a decade I have amassed a growing collection of books that I vow to read one day. I would like to show you a picture of my collection, but I’m too embarrassed.
I saw a headline that said that Gen Z are looking to go back to how things used to be for us millennials, i.e. Nokia 3310 and portable CD players. Maybe they will eventually lead the backward change that humanity needs. We need to stop scrolling and pick a book or go outside and just make friends.
This lost art has not just affected leisurely reading. It has affected how people read long emails at work. You send out an email with all the required information that your stakeholders need to have before an important meeting, so that the meeting can run smoothly, yet almost all of them turn up without reading the email, expecting you to narrate what you have written. It is easier for them to digest the information verbally. No one wants to read long, boring emails when they could wait for you to tell them what you have written over a zoom call.
So where do we go from here as a people? I am not particularly an eloquent person, however, I am able to put my thoughts down clearly in written words. A skill that I resort to often when I struggle to communicate my feelings to my husband. I simply write it down and have him read it. It is usually quite a long read. Imagine if he struggled to read and comprehend written text thus forcing me to communicate verbally like people in the work place who refuse to read their emails. That would not have made for a happy marriage.
Challenge yourself to pick up the book that have been promising yourself to read. Let us get back into reading. And no, listening to audio books is not the same. In my opinion, audio books are basically podcasts. You are supposed to settle into a book and get lost in the plot, doing nothing else other than reading. Audio books don’t give you that feeling, you can multitask while listening to an audio book. It’s not quite the same. That being said, if there’s a genre that you could get away with listening to on audio, it would be the biographies of interesting people. I listened to Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Prince Harry’s Spare on Audio book. I loved that they recorded the audio version of their books themselves. In this case it helps draw you into the story that they were telling.
