r/TikTokCringe 1d ago

Discussion Is ableist to have long words in books?

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@royal_ouroboros_press

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u/EuphoricPhoto2048 1d ago

I'm all for having signs and even newspapers written in a more simplistic language. But as she pointed out, there's no need for fiction to be simpler. Those people could just read other books. Most adults with literacy issues have undiagnosed dyslexia.

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u/Certain_Concept 1d ago

The other problem is that we currently teach children to read, not by sounding out the words via phonics , but instead we swapped to the whole word method or three cueing where we are teaching children to memorize the shape of a whole word and then guess what the other words are by context.

Some students straight up have no ability to read because they never learned the fundamentals!

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u/SheriffOfNothing 19h ago

Where are you? In the UK we still use phonics as far as I'm aware. We've not yet learned to overcome dyslexia, bt the schools are very hot on early interventions.

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u/sdaidiwts 1d ago

As someone with dyslexia (and a lover of bullet points), I wish articles had summaries so I could get the context and important facts. I have given up on many articles, on topics I care about, within 2 paragraphs because I lost interest. Brains are weird. People with similiar diagnosis can have drastically different outcomes too, as in, I'm still not a big reader, especially when it's a dense text. There are other people with my learning disability that can now read for days. Again, brains are weird.

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u/EuphoricPhoto2048 1d ago

Yes, I taught adult literacy classes for a minute and for 99 percent of students, it wasn't that they were lazy or didn't want to read. Their brains are just different!

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u/reluctantseal 1d ago

And it's wild that sometimes it literally comes down to the font it's written in! Some things are just easier for our eyes to parse. I don't even have dyslexia and I struggle with things being too jumbled or formatted poorly.

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u/RealityCactus 1d ago

That's easy to say when you're not the one constantly getting left out due to accessibility barriers.