Reading texts on paper significantly improves understanding, much more than when dealing with digital texts. Just as we are discussing a substantial research coordinated by Professor Nicola Grandi (University of Bologna) on the linguistic skills of university students (it is a recurring theme: for a significant percentage they are poor; above all, based on the latest data, as regards punctuation), the data of a study by the University of Valencia, published in the authoritative Review of Educational Research, has hit the international media. According to it, there is a difference, or rather an important deficit, regarding knowledge of the language, grammar and syntax, and it is a direct consequence of reading habits. The one on paper, obviously over a long period of time, i.e. when it has become a habit, can in fact improve understanding skills by six to eight times compared to the digital one.
The explanation would seem obvious, considering that texts on the web, including many of those with cultural ambitions and projects (just think of Wikipedia, but also of many independent and sometimes ephemeral magazines) are often poorly cared for from a formal point of view, sometimes confused and even in some cases not very coherent and understandable; furthermore they often make a naive and approximate use of the language, limiting themselves to a sort of transcription of speech. If we then move on to examine the broader field of social media (it is, after all, a common everyday experience for many of us) the panorama is that of a desolate writing, not only a transcription of speech but of ambiguous and hasty speech: the The attention of the writer and the reader is at a minimum level, so much so that misunderstandings multiply in discussions of this kind.
The research does not want to demonize digital transformation, but aims to understand its effects. According to one of the scholars who signed it, Professor Ladislao Salmerón, hasty inattention applies both to work – or study – and to recreation. «The association between the frequency of digital reading for free time and text comprehension skills – he explains – is close to zero». This would seem to be due to the fact that “the linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts”, but not always. What changes above all is the reading method, which «in digital texts – explains the scholar – tends to be more superficial», beyond the quality of the texts themselves.
What we read on social media can be colloquial and lacking in syntax, incapable of complex reasoning, or highly articulated and valuable: but the result tends to be the same. In the research (which examined around thirty studies on reading comprehension published between 2000 and 2022, which means that it collected data from as many as 470,000 participants) the example of novels is given: on the web or on file the reader “does not fully immerse himself in the narrative”; and in the case of non-fiction “it does not fully capture the complex relationships of an informative text” – whether high-level or not. And this, for Professor Salmerón, (he was more optimistic, he told the Guardian), was no small surprise. Not entirely pleasant.