There is a crisis! No one knows how to read anymore! This is objectively the worst possible medium for announcing this crisis and coming to a conclusion because of the aforementioned nature of the crisis. But we must start somewhere.
Let’s start with how people started to learn to read. Hopefully, this will give us a clue on some action items and deliverables we can focus on bringing back reading. Well, most people start with simple books like Frog and Toad (an all-time classic), then read chapter books (shoutout to Dink, Josh, and Ruth Rose), scientific articles, and then spend most of their career reading short emails.
What could have possibly caused everyone to forget how to read? Perhaps a lack of practice. But this seems unlikely because our internal statistics show that a record 300,000 people read our article about the Pit last week. If this is the case, then there’s a wonderful archive of past Off the Press articles that represent the highest standards of journalism and would make excellent reading practice. Maybe everyone bumped their heads in a weird way. This would be a massive statistical anomaly if everyone hit their head just right at the same time, but way more plausible than a lack of practice. To fix this, we’d probably just have everyone unhit their head, but gently touch it to the surface and bring their head back rapidly like they are pulling the impact out of the surface.
Why is this a problem? Society depends on communication. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t live in the society we all live in because, we live in a society. Written communication is among the most powerful tools for communication, but people need to be able to read. For example, they need to read stop signs and speed limit signs. Those are important. To be clear, no one has forgotten how to write though, which is why the author can still produce this article.
Do we have any other alternatives? Well, a lot of musicians will have a lot of artful metaphors about communicating through music, which admittedly does a powerful job of conveying emotions. Unfortunately, the classic musical staff, while not included in things people forgot how to “read,” does not convey information like the most recent quarterly expense reports very effectively. We could also try doing everything in picture books, but again, they don’t display data with tables very well.
We ask our readers, (this seems like it won’t work all of a sudden) to submit ideas and tips to us. Why do you think everyone forgot how to read? What do you think we should do about it? We are just speculating here. We will do our best to get to all the information you submit, but of course, you don’t know that we’re requesting it, and if you did submit something, we won’t be able to read it. And then in our follow-up article about it, no one would understand the conclusions we came to. This is truly an unmitigated disaster!
Hopefully, the issue resolves itself. If there’s one thing we’re good at at Off the Press, it’s ignoring problems. We report on as much as we can, but at some point, we have to draw a line and focus on what’s important. And everyone forgetting how to read is important. So we decided not to write about anything else this week.
