The Literacy Crisis: Dialogue Skimming
Good afterevenmorn, Readers!
I am back again with more internet drama that I believe is all interconnected and all very much related to the current literacy crisis we are suffering. This time, it’s all about skimming. Specially, the revelation that all these social media “readers” are actually just skipping to the dialogue and reading only that. Let’s dive into this little nugget, shall we?
Not to overuse this gif, but this is the exact face I made when I first heard about this practice.
My darlings, what do you mean you only read the dialogue?! How can anyone possibly consider a book read if the only thing that was read was the dialogue?! This is insane!
Honestly, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit. Though, it does go a long way into explaining why some books that I considered to be poorly written became so popular, I guess, if all they were being judged on was the dialogue. Good grief.
Alright, if you thought me harsh in the last article, this one might get savage. Well, as savage as I’m able to be while I am also incredibly sad, because both as a reader and a writer, this revelation has utterly depressed me.
“I read —”
No. No you did not. You didn’t read those books. You might have skimmed them. But you certainly didn’t read them. I’d wager you have a very shallow understanding of those books, if you didn’t read the dialogue and hallucinate an entirely different story to fit.
The main culprit for this practice appears to be a desire to be seen as a prolific reader, instead of being just a reader. It’s the bizarre need to claim to have read an absurd number of books; for clout, I guess. But if they’re alright with being liars, there’s not much to do about it, I suppose.
Here’s the thing, folks who do this, you are robbing yourself. Absolute, pitiful thievery. You have stolen from yourself the weird, wonderful, breathless tumble into new worlds; the taste of the air, the colours of the forest in the twilight, the smell of salted boar roasting on a spit, the woodsmoke in the cool air…
You have taken away the sound of war horns, the tumult of battle, the zip of bullets as you crawl with your hero through the muck, and grief, and terror.
This world that was conceived and lovingly brought to life upon the page by a writer whose work you have decided to disregard for a number that isn’t real. After all, you didn’t read those books. That number claimed is a lie.
More, you’re robbing yourselves of the beauty of the written word; how satisfying it is to have words flow like music, how they can be manipulated to dance or to shudder, to sing or to stutter as the story demands.
I make no secret of the fact that Steven Erikson is among my favourite authors. A large part of that is how wonderfully he constructs his prose. Sometimes more than the incredible stories he tells, the prose is what lands hardest. I am continually impressed as a reader (and not a little bit jealous as a writer).
And yet more, you’re stealing away important context, nuance, and character moments from your experience of the story. All of which happens without a single syllable uttered by the characters.
Sometimes, characters don’t speak for an entire chapter. What do you do then?
I am struggling to understand why this is even a thing. Surely if one enjoys reading the way these people claim to, they’d want everything. Not just the dialogue. Apparently not.
It might be easy to blame social media for this nonsense. But the social media itself isn’t the problem. There are plenty of actual readers who do love reading, who have been staring at the number of books proclaimed as read with as much confusion as I did before I heard about this thing (honestly, how on earth could anyone read more than two hundred books in a month. How? HOW?! Oh… by not actually reading them. Gotchya).
They’re not the problem, and they’ve found and built wonderful communities that would not have been possible without social media. Social media can truly be a wonderful place of support, community, and connection.
It’s the people on there lying to their viewers, proclaiming to have read a book when they, in fact, have just skimmed it that are the issue. People are at the core of this problem.
Sure, they might be feeling a pressure to be seen as prolific readers facilitated by social media, but I have a feeling that is largely self-imposed. This chasing clout in the reading sphere is entirely their own manufacture. No reader I know cares so much about how many books were read. They care about what was read, and what you actually thought about it.
I don’t think that folks will stop being silly about reading. The desire to elevate oneself, even on the flimsiest of pretences, will always affect every sphere, never mind the bookish corners of the world. Appeals to stop misleading their viewers will likely mean nothing to folks who have been comfortable doing exactly that to date. So all I will ask is that they stop robbing themselves of all the wonderful things that reading beyond the dialogue will give them. There are entire worlds out there, my loves.
My darlings, you are missing out on so, so much.
When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills… and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark, Human and The Timbercreek Incident.
Hmm. I wonder how many of the people who prefer to read only dialogue were trained or learned to read on graphic novels. Other than a little bit of onomatopoeia, those are completely dialogue. Lots of people don’t pause to look at the pictures, they just glance to get a rough idea of the action, read the dialogue, and move on.
Agreed. People who just read dialogue are only doing themselves a disservice. It would be impossible to read and understand a Nina Kiriki Hoffman novel, if only going by what characters say, for instance. And Italo Calvino would be completely out of reach.
I wonder how dialogue-skimmers handle first-person narratives, because technically that sort of book would be entirely dialogue addressed to the reader.
What about novels which are almost entirely in dialogue? The novels of Alan Garner come to mind, especially The Owl Service and Red Shift. I recall reading the Owl Service when I was 11 or 12, having devoured his first three books. It was a shock. There is so much dialogue and so little supporting prose – description, expository. It is not a long book but time felt long as I worked through it. It was, perhaps, the first book I read where I really felt I had to work at it, to understand the meaning not the least because it was based on a Welsh legend which I did not know and was about adolescent relationships which I was only just on the cusp of knowing! Pared down to the bone, skipping is just not an option. The upside of this was that, once finished, I really felt I had achieved something – got through to the end of a puzzle. It prepared me not only for tackling Red Shift, which is a whole lot more difficult than The Owl Service but also for studying literature at university in a way which no teacher could, because I had to solve all the problems myself. Teachers can direct and explain but reading is a solitary experience and if you are not prepared to tackle the difficulties of a book by yourself, then you might as well just put the book down. I suppose that is just my way of saying that reading is not a lazy occupation. It is immersive and skipping the descriptive and explicatory passages is just plain stupid.
Thanks for another thought-provoking article, S.M. I have no idea why someone would do this except, as you note, to increase their book count. Glancing at the chapter of the book I am currently reading, dialogue doesn’t start until midway through the 4th page of an 11 page chapter and then is maybe 10 – 20% of the remaining word count. How could anyone read just dialogue and get the gist of the story? Or any enjoyment? (the reason I am reading this book). It’s worse than just reading the cliff’s notes of the Goodreads summary. Kinda like saying I watched 12 movies last night after watching 12 trailers. It gets to the point the number gets so high, it is no longer believable.
But a bit of confession on my part, I have been known to skip portions of a certain fantasy author who likes to describe in detail the sword play of his protagonist – sometimes for multiple pages. After reading through those passages in earlier books, I now will skip to the last paragraph of the fight to read about the killing stroke. I admit, it is to get to the part of story that I am interested in (and eventually on to another book).
Thanks again for the great article.
It kind of is nice to get an author one enjoys who consistently follows a feature formula, for that reason. There’s an author I follow who writes fun procedurals, but likes to stick random steamy scenes in the middle of them. Happily, they’re all predictable and have about the same length, so on a new book it’s easy to flip a few pages or hit the fast forward button for a little bit, and land right back in the procedural goodness without having missed anything.
I didn’t realize there were people claiming to read those kinds of numbers of books. As for myself, I started out as a reader caring very little for the dialogue, wanting more the description and action. Over the years I learned to appreciate good dialogue but, as you indicate, a complete book is about all of its elements.
Someone who does blame reading on screens/social media/the internet generally is English journalist James Marriott. He may be a bit of a young fogey, but he does make some telling points that you may agree with on the ‘literacy crisis. He just published a book on this in the UK – ‘The New Dark Ages: The end of reading and the dawn of a post literate society.’
When reading Roddy Doyle, I only read the dialogue. There’s not much else there–page numbers, really.
I’m currently reading John Crowley’s “Little, Big” for the fourth time, and if I were to skip a word for any reason other than being sleepy (which happens, I’m human), I’d only be hurting myself.
I’m also a devotee of The New Yorker and investigative journalism in general. If I only read dialogue, I’d miss most of the best non-fiction going.
And I’ve interacted with far too many professional actors who skip over stage directions, as if they couldn’t possibly be intentional, or of any use.
So, I’m fully on your side.
But.
I’m thinking of changing my stripes.
Next book I read, it’s time for dialogue only. I mean, what choice do I have? Gotta see what’s happening on Tik-Tok and X, amiright?