"Skim reading is the new normal." [Sigh]. It needn't be so.
Elevator tale: a recent article in The Guardian suggests that reading on-screen encourages surface reading. Things are rather more nuanced, and there is a risk of overlooking studies that imply no significant difference across print and on-screen. Digital media certainly do encourage skim reading, but it is a mistake to assume that on-screen reading cannot be as effective as reading from print. A colleague linked me to a recent article in The Guardian , criticising the way in which reading from a screen threatens deep processing , as if there is an inevitability from screen-reading to skimming. The article cites various studies I considered in my 2016 article on the subject , and I've been careful to keep up to speed with subsequent developments (including the odd study I'd overlooked). Since that update I've also collected a few further studies, which will be the subject of a future post. For now, though, I'd like to consider the explicit and implicit claims in W