I've wrote user instructions and setup guides for my last job to copy paste in for common issues. A ton of people struggle to follow the instructions even with screenshots and big red arrows for each step. I've run a few though analyzers and find targeting a 3rd grade reading level is the max you can do before you get questions about the instructions.
Best bet is screenshot for each tiny step(cropped with the big red arrows) with nothing more complicated than "click here" as text. Just assume the end user can't or won't read.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Same. You can't write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.
They refuse to read anything that's in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don't you dare make it a compound sentence.
A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads... they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are 'too many words'.
A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I'm overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can't just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.
Everything published at or below 6th grade reading level
Americans consume this content almost exclusively
The median reader consumes at or below the 6th grade level
even ivy league students don't read books anymore.
College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different.
I love Vibes Based Reporting.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
As someone who was in college twenty years ago, I've got to say there's no way in hell I could make it through an entire novel in a week while balancing the rest of my course load. Either I'm reading the Cliff's Notes or I'm not getting it done. I also ran a 15-hour course study in hopes of landing a triple major in four years (bad idea, kids!), but even with a more conservative 12-hour load, imagine this plus 3 other classes making the same demands on your time.
This isn't a new problem. It is, perhaps, a problem that the current generation of students no longer has the cheat-codes to navigate. But doggedly insisting people were housing a 400-page book in a week and retaining it for meaningful discussion? Get fucked, dude. Nobody was actually doing that ever.
If you could come to the table talking about these novels, its because you already read them in High School, not because you consumed them in a week in your hectic freshman year.
I was in college 20 years ago too. I read multiple books per week for fun, often on top of my regular coursework. It wasn't hard, it was just a matter of priorities. My priority was to learn. I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Your presumption is wild. You basically think because you didn't do the work, nobody could, or should do it. You are part of the problem here. Reading a 400 page novel is not that time consuming dude, esp in college. In my AP English class we read one every 2-3 weeks.
Rather than rise to the challenge of learning, you want to pretend that it's an onerous requirement that nobody could possible attain. What, so you can party more, or dick around on the internet? Are you the type who goes to book clubs and doesn't read the book and then thinks anyone who did is a stupid nerd? I've definitely encountered plenty of those people in my book clubs, which is precisely why I don't do them anymore.
I probably read 500 pages a week on average.
Pride and Prejudice alone is 400 pages. Crime and Punishment is another 600 pages. If you have two Lit classes in the same semester, you're going to have to double that rate or fall behind schedule. Nevermind retention.
I remember sitting in a library surrounded by books, struggling to solve the 15 problems a class Engineering Physics assigned. Just a fist full of brain-teasers day in and day out. Three of us working together managed to clear the load in a couple of hours. Then on to the next assignment, which was another two or three hours. Five classes a day, you're lucky when you have enough time to sleep.
I'll admit, I did a few summers at a community college and that workload was much smaller, the tests were far easier, and the graders significantly more forgiving. Crazy how little work it takes to ace an exam in High School Plus relative to a University weed-out program.
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33% of high school graduates never read another book again in their lives after graduation.
Let that sink in.
228 million adults in the US, and 75 million of them are committed to never reading.
Sounds a lot like the voting block for a certain orange fascist.....
Hey just FYI, that statistic is bullshit
Even Brewer, the author of the infographic, publicly admitted in 2012 that he couldn’t back up any of the statistics and asked people to stop sharing it. Brewer claims to have used statistics from a survey by an organization called the Jenkins Group, though the group itself says the statistics were incorrectly attributed to them. Brewer has never been able to provide any other source of the numbers he used in the infographic.
The questionable statistics seem to have originally come from a 2011 Mental Floss article, which claimed to have taken them from a Jenkins survey from 2003. Mental Floss has updated the original article saying they have no idea where the statistics came from, either.
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That was the goal of the Republicans. When US was in the middle of the cold war, schools were pushing STEM because military and industry needed STEM graduates, but the side effect of education is left leaning voters. So since the 60s, the US education system has degraded to the point that college sports scholarship grads can be illiterate.
So the gap in tech was filled in with H1b Visa people trained at proper universities.
in 2025, Harvard students don't even attend lectures. They still get As because they paid for As.
The system was degraded because of the local tax revolts in the 1970s, which were perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. The citizenry decided they no longer wanted to pay property taxes and education funding collapsed in many states. It was also a consequence of white flight, and other social changes in the 1970s in response to the civil rights victories.
Republicans capitalized on it in the 1980s and made it a national issue and the voters loved it. People loved Reagan, he was incredibly popular and crushed Mondale winning every state expect for MN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidential_election
Could we get an archive link? That article is pay walled.
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Not to rain on the anti-US sentiment here, but this isn't far off from most other western/developed/colonial/whatever (aka members of OECD) countries. I don't know what study they're talking about in the article, since they never cite their source, but here's the results from a similar survey from 2013 (PIAAC study).
In terms of literacy, only 6/24 countries are reading at Level 3 (roughly equivalent to what other studies describe as "above a 6th grade level", it does not track 1:1 since again I don't know which study they're using initially) and the remainder are reading at Level 2 (I feel comfortable describing it as "at or below a 6th grade reading level" based off the criteria used in other studies).
The US for sure has an education problem, but it's not as dire as this article makes it sound. In the above PIAAC study, the difference in literacy is only ~20% between the top score of 296.2 (Japan) and the bottom of 250.5 (Italy), and at 269.8 (USA) is only ~10% behind Japan in terms of mean score. We should absolutely be doing better, we're among the worst for non-starters and < Level 1 (illiterate and partially illiterate respectively), but when looking at the values in context we're not really doing all that egregiously compared to other OECD countries.
(edit: spelling)
A nerdy side note:
I question the relevancy of the < Level 1 statistics, as the controls for partial literacy do not appear to have been robust for non-native speakers of the survey languages. This may have been by design, but given the high rate of invalidation due to language incompatibilities seen in other studies, I am hesitant to draw conclusions from that value without a clearer understanding of the methodology. Partial literacy due to language incompatibility is extremely easy to mask for basic questions, but imho should differentiated better from partial literacy among native speakers.
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That's a lot of numbers without any citations. I mean, it feels right. But please take the minute to add your sources.
They also think below 6th grade levels. People in this country are dumb as shit.
That's why it is called reading comprehension. That last word is usually glossed over but is the important part of the two. Almost anyone beyond second grade can read the words in a text; comprehension and manipulation though....
Oh so then they’re fully qualified to be ICE. No intelligence required. In fact, intelligence hurts your chances.
Thats LITERALLY what police in my area were advertising 10 years ago for a hiring event.
They had fliers for a big hiring event that said "High school diploma not required. Dropouts encouraged to apply"
I remember seeing it and saying "Well this can only end well." in a very sarcastic tone.
I'm European and already figured this out the moment I got on the internet 🤣
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Now who benefits from a poorly educated populace?
Follow the fuckin money.
If they could do you think Trump would have gotten elected TWICE! nevermind he probably still would have...
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As an avid audio book listener I really thought the rise of podcasts would make americans more literate but it seems like it had an inverse effect.
What's going on in the US? Is the water poisoned with heavy metals or something? The mental decline is palpable.
The boomers are aging and lead poisoned. Education system is spotty. Poor areas have less tax revenue, leading to worse schools, and that creates a cycle.
People are addicted to social media and it's literally rotting their brains. 15 second video clips with the same background audio playing in a loop.
I think it is a lot of things happening concurrently.
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I dont know if its because I'm getting older (Nearly 39 now) and I don't read outside of using a computer but I feel like my overall vocabulary, spellying and grammar get worse and worse by the day. Feel like I need brain training.
Yes, like GreenKnight said, read more books, it helps with concentration, reading comprehension and just calming down.
It's great thing for not only your brain but your overall well-being.
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Clearly the DOE has been doing a great job for 40+ years, reducing the average reading level
Class content is determined almost entirely at the local or state level, not the federal. How well students in Mississippi read has almost nothing to do with how the DOE has been doing, because what kids in Mississippi (and every other state) learn is determined by the state.
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It is unfortunante that this was propably planned in order to result in a workforce that doesn't question things.
I wonder what the numbers are for other countries. I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school's over. Atrophy of the brain.
Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world. But it still feels like there are a LOT of idiots with no critical thinking skills, no functional reading ability, etc.
I think a lot of people tend to get dumber after school’s over. Atrophy of the brain.
You move from an environment that's constantly challenging and stressing your brain muscles to an environment that asks you to do the same repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. I think the most glaring example of this is the recent tendency towards "Vibes Coding".
How AI Vibe Coding Is Erasing Developers’ Skills
One developer on Hacker News mentioned this perfectly: "For a while, I barely bothered to check what Claude was doing because the code it generated tended to work on the first try. But now I realize I've stopped understanding my own codebase."
This is the trap. The AI works so well initially that you stop paying attention. You stop learning. You stop thinking. And by the time you realize what's happened, your skills have already degraded significantly.
And since most of the US syndicated news publications and entertainment fiction deliberately publish at a 6th grade level... that's the level people tend to operate at for the rest of their adult lives.
Adult literacy rate of my country is 99.8% which beats most of the world.
I mean, 6th grade reading is literate. It's not as though 6th graders can't read. They just don't have the advanced language skills you'd need to survive a college course on Proust or whatever.
I know an illiterate who is very clever and knows the score. All this heading means is that 54% of americans have trouble understanding or making out what the propaganda thrown at them means.
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