tl;dr

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Naomi Baron's Words Onscreen gave us insight into the challenges of reading as we shift from print to digital.

TL;DR

In such a vast and overwhelming information economy, too much text is competing for our attention. Naomi Baron’s Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World synthesized a range of research that supports what we, as readers of digital texts, already intuit: reading onscreen is hard! It’s hard for a variety of reasons: we get lost in digital texts that don’t help us locate ourselves spatially within the text; backlit screens and pixelation cause eye strain; we miss the pleasurable haptic and sensory experience of “physical” texts; we can’t make notes, underline, or cut up and rearrange a digital article; and, of course, we can’t keep reading this really long, boring (though we know it’s ever so important!) piece because there may be something so much more cool and interesting just one little click away. FOMO. How does a writer cope with the knowledge that the texts they pour their blood, sweat, and tears into writing will not be read? As writers, we owe it to ourselves to wrestle with the factors that lead to tl;dr and come up with ideas for engaging readers with digital texts, keeping them reading.