What are the biggest challenges you experience when engaging with informational texts? How do those challenges vary across texts, contexts, purposes?
(Being intentionally vague here to cast a wide net—humor me?)
Conversation
Replying to
Underutilization of fonts and indentation to separate paragraphs and sections; Trouble parsing numbers w/ 4+digits unless periods/commas used, which is not universal; missing context for stylized facts (eg I want comparators of last yrs data, similar country, etc.)
1
1
A more general claim: graphics, especially simple arrow diagrams, like very simplified & informal causal graphs (eg DAGs), seem really underutilized in nonfiction.
Plenty of awkward paragraphs can be accompanied by simple graphs
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
Depends wildly, but sometimes there's a reluctance to use diagrams, charts, or illustrations when they would explain the concept much better.
That may be because of the difficulty of putting an image into a word processor. Writing by hand and drawing makes this easier.
1
3
(Then again, it's not a massive problem, because I can think of many good texts that are full of diagrams.)
1
Replying to
I feel like often there is a mismatch between the intention that brought me to the text (which was set by some other shorter text) and then what the text is doing in the first couple of paragraphs. This is the biggest reason for dropping reading something in my experience.
5
Replying to
Not sure about biggest but:
1. Cross-referring diagrams/formulae etc is often annoying as layout in print forces related text to be far away. (textbooks and academic papers)
2. Chasing inter-textual references, citations, usages is tedious
3. Lack of portable digital marginalia
9
Replying to
I think for me, it’s contextual search. I have notes written on some topic, but to come back to it to quickly find details relevant to a problem is very inefficient.
Replying to
The context switching from reading to taking notes on the topic. For technical content, I like to try and follow along (rewrite the equations, draw my own diagrams, etc), but then I get caught up fiddling with the UI and it becomes harder to flip back into reading mode.
1
3
Replying to
Staying vague, reverse-engineering an author's latent mental model of what they're trying to communicate.
2