Analyzing Atwood’s Blogpost

In Atwood’s article Because Reading is Fundamental, he outlines the importance of listening, or reading within the context of the blogosphere. Atwood’s demographic seems to be from around 19-25 years of age. The language used in the piece is quite simple and colloquial. This straightforward and simple writing style implies that the occupation and education level of the reader is most likely entry level jobs with little post secondary education.

The blog entry begins with image of a user’s information displayed next to their name in a discussion. The image catches your eye while helping to emphasize his key point. It shows peoples focus on numbers of posts and wanting those numbers to be high without concern for quality of content. His key idea in the article is on the value of conversations and how that is affected by how much people in conversations talk. His argument posits that in order to have good conversation or discussion one must spend less time talking and more time listening. Moreover, he explains the problem of people not fully reading articles before contributing to discussions without the full context and knowledge.

Atwood references two pieces of research to support his argument. First he mentions the Ars Banana Experiment. Ars Technica posted an article called ‘Guns at home more likely to be used stupidly than in self defense’ and embedded a sentence in the 7th paragraph of 11, instructing the reader to post the word ‘Banana’ in the comments if they had read that far into the article. Atwood used this experiment to help demonstrate how common it is for a reader not to look at the full article and rather just read the first little bit or even just the title. Furthermore this experiment shows how people will still post in the comment section with their opinion on a piece they haven’t even read. Atwood also provides photos of the experiment which gives the reader the opportunity to analyze the information themselves.

The second experiment he references is similar to the first but highlights his key idea in a more broad and statistical manner. The Slate Experiment collected data based on real usage to demonstrate on average what percentage of an article a person actually read. The information is presented in in a bar graph. It shows that the majority of readers only view about 50% of the article. This data helps to emphasize Atwood’s main point that most viewers do not bother to carefully read all of the material before responding with their own opinion. With both examples, Atwood plays to what he knows about reader statistics to make his piece memorable and easily comprehensible. His use of images and short paragraphs and simple language help to keep the reader's attention and to encourage the viewer to read the blog post fully.

Atwood suggests several solutions to his proposed problem. He proposes that it is possible to incentivise listening (or reading) through removing interruptions to reading primarily pagination, measuring reading times and displaying them, giving rewards for reading, and updating the blog in real time. Making an article or blog post more interactive by displaying reading times, giving rewards and updating it in real time gives it a sense of urgency and more direct connection with the viewer.

Atwood argues that if we become better readers/listeners it will help us have better insights and make us more successful people when contributing to conversations or discussions online. In the blogpost he clearly lays out the issues he sees in reader participation and gives relevant and interesting examples emphasizing his main idea. His use of imagery also helps to keep the reader engaged and to promote the participation of the viewer in the act of reading. He confidently utilizes a straightforward writing style and logically executed argument to not only prove his point but also provide realistic solutions to the problem he laid out.