affirmations for writers: i know how to write. i have seen sentences before, and i know how to make one. i can identify up to several words and their meanings. i am not afraid of semicolons.
inspired by a rant i was going on elsewhere bc someone tweeted something very stupid and uninformed about hamlet and it got my back up as someone who took two single-text-focus english literature courses in college and they were on wuthering heights and hamlet, i now put it to all of you on here:
what's "your" shakespeare play?
hamlet
macbeth
the tempest
merchant of venice
midsummer night's dream
twelfth night
richard iii
othello
julius caesar
king lear
another not listed (specify in tags) (i really just put my own top 10 here nbd)
i have no particular feelings about any shakespeare play/results tag
one of the worst things about being a writer is when you have to sit on your hands about a REALLY COOL SPOILER. and you just want everyone to know about the really cool spoiler you want them to know so so so badly but the best way for them to learn it would be to experience it and you also want them to do THAT so youāre just sitting on your hands vibrating and making a low whine while your dog looks at you with concern. and then your friends go āwhatās wrongā. and you go PLEASE I NEED TO TELL YOU. and they go āoh okay so tell meā. and you go NO,
a lot of phm fandom sadism tends to be focused on grace and, like, i get it, he's got a lot in common with one of those stress toys with the eyes that pop out of its skull in a way that's kind of cute and kind of viciously satisfying when you squeeze it, but the amount of times i see rocky being overlooked or even being the one to lead the efforts to violate his hard-won and precarious safety - with the best of intentions, but at the end of the day, well, he's an alien with alien cultural norms and values that might affect his judgement [pause while i roll my eyes] - it does honestly make me wonder if we watched the same movie. especially the scene where rocky tears down the only thing protecting him from dying in prolonged and hideous agony with his bare hands to save grace from suffocating in adrian's gravity. yeah, he has unimaginably horrific (try to conceive of being alone, truly isolated in the most literal sense of the word, for 46 years. you can't.) abandonment trauma and outwardly lacks much sympathy for grace's boundaries (which are themselves the product of a lifetime of experiences more nuanced and not necessarily beneficial to him or anyone else than uncomplicatedly right), but he values grace; values his life and everything that entails - his comfort and safety and happiness, his desires and needs and opinions - while he values himself very little by comparison. so many of his efforts to connect with grace cost him just as much, if not more, of his comfort and safety, but he does it anyway because he loves him beyond rationality and because he would rather die than be alone again, and that isn't hyperbole. rocky would delay his return home by years if it meant that grace could make it back alive, even if he'll never be able to see it. rocky would do anything in his power to fix a problem, including die trying. grace understands that rocky isn't responsible for the deaths of 23 people, we as the audience understand because grace explains it to us, and any reasonable person would also understand if the same facts were presented to them, but rocky doesn't have that kind of faith in himself. rocky will make sure that if it has to be even one more, it won't be grace, or adrian, or any other eridian or human he could have saved if he was only good enough to fix it. because if he can't, then what's the point of him having survived, just to be left alone again when everyone else is gone?
"ohhhhh grace doesn't love himself enough to let himself say no" he literally says no. quite firmly. it's actually pretty significant to the plot of the entire story that he says no. you're thinking of one Rocky Thee Eridian.
I have my phone set to grayscale and I dont know how to explain it but this for some reason this bird grasshopper looks like a Ron Perlman professional head shot.
I have apiphobia that I'm actively fighting all the time and on a hike today I saw what is thought were two big wasps fighting but now that I'm home I'm realizing they could have been wasp mimicking moths mating and I wish I had gotten a closer/better picture.
it's very frustrating seeing otherwise well-structured posts about media literacy and critical thinking bookended with statements about "nowadays", "nobody has literacy anymore", "this generation is so anti-intellectual", and the like, unquestioningly falling into better past fallacies.
Do we really think the 80s and its Satanic Panic were better at critical thinking? what about the 40s? the Victorian era? societies have always had problems with critical thinking and literacy, because most societies have dealt with propaganda, corrupt leadership, difficulty providing education (due to poverty or discrimination or other issues), and/or people who resist critical thinking (due to privilege or circumstance or what have you). we can criticize media trends without pulling a "well back in the GOOD OLD DAYS" about it.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I don't think anyone talks about how important it is to get a sunscreen you actually like. So many posts are about how the sun is a deadly laser and you need to protect your skin but I know I avoided it for years because of sensory issues.
Now, I have a sunscreen that doesn't give me those issues (not ready or sticky) but that I genuinely love putting on my face because it feels like a moisturizer (as opposed to actual face moisturizers which I hate).
The drawback is that it's a European sunscreen and I'm in the US, so it can get expensive to get it. But it's absolutely worth it, knowing that neither the deadly laser in the sky or the sensory issues down here on earth can get to me now.
I realized today that I'm three weeks away from releasing the first book in a Mystery Thriller novel and I have not said a word about it on here.
Author bad at marketing = fork found in kitchen.
But! There are still three weeks left to hype up this book and I'm going to do my best.
In Her Bones, book 1 in the Hale Hastings Mystery Thriller Series, releases July 15th and the ebook is up for preorder now!
You can get a copy here: https://readerlinks.com/l/5486230
A fugitive FBI trainee. A sharp-witted private investigator. And a massive rescue dog who digs up a deadly secret.
Hale Hastings is running out of places to hide. Framed for the murder of her FBI mentor and branded armed and dangerous, she sheds her past, assumes a new identity, and flees to the high desert of Bend, Oregon. Her only rule for survival as a quiet local bartender? Keep her head down, her back to the wall, and her eyes on the exits.
But laying low is impossible when you catch the attention of a tenacious local private investigator. Kenna Scott immediately senses the lethal edge beneath the new bartender's quiet facade. Instead of turning Hale in, Kenna offers a dangerous deal: partner up and help crack the cold cases the police have abandoned.
Their first lead comes from an unexpected sourceāRogue, a massive, unruly rescue dog obsessed with slipping his bonds. When Rogue drags Hale out to the middle of no-where, he seemingly unearths a chilling, seven-year-old secret that was never meant to be found.
As Hale and Kenna are pulled into a labyrinth of dark, small-town lies, Hale realizes that solving this case might be the exact leverage she needs to clear her own name. But the closer they get to the truth, the more she realizes she isn't the only one doing the hunting
gamechangershow
stormborns
theartofmadeline
titsay
origamiaround
