Microblog Memes

Because they're being somewhat derisive and structured their sentences to be less comprehensible

"...you have ironically demonstrated that a pre-existing functional understanding of the concepts at play is an important component of more advanced literacy."

Translation: being familiar with more words/concepts gives you the ability to understand what was said on a deeper level.

This actually took more effort to write than the esoteric one, because I put in effort to make sure I'm not being esoteric for the sake of it. I'm not against using more vocab or higher level sentence structure, but the sentence I quoted is a perfect example of being verbose for no gain in understanding or richness in the sentence.

The ability to correctly parse long segments of text, in their totality, is essentially an entirely different kind of ability to read, compared to just being able to evaluate short sentences or paragraphs.

It takes a higher degree of literacy to be able to do this.

Same thing with more vs less complex sentence structures, etc.

This is why there really is no substitute for developing advanced literacy, other than actually reading a wide variety of, whole, complete, long texts... books, basically.

But... our modern era has focused on minimizing everything down to the most succinct way to get across some point... maximize efficiency, by destroying nuance.

This tendency is so severe that, as you point out, most people these days just typically gloss over a 'wall of text', because they assume it is... some kind of crash out, some kind of insane screed or hyperemotional outburst.

But long form writing... was traditionally the way that humans would communicate with each other.

Postage, mail, letters... would be pages and pages long, people would write what I guess what we would now call 'essays'... just to let their friends or family know how they are doing.

Because you might only get a letter once a month, once a year.

We are losing this ability, as rapid and short increasingly becomes the new technological norm, similar to how people used to know how to drive around their own town without a GPS minimap.

Why are they booing me?

They aren't very literate, they mainly understand 'literate' to be just a value judgement on a person, which is why they are reacting more like I've insulted someone, than I have tried to explain what literacy is, and how it works.

They're more concerned with a social/ethical sense of punishing people they view as mean...

...they're more concerned with labelling 'good' people with 'good' labels, and 'bad' people with 'bad' labels...

Than they are with understanding what those labels actually mean, than considering that constructive criticism can be a learning opportunity, not a malevolent humiliation ritual.

I looked up the test and I get top category because I can read and understand academic papers but I'd fail that guys test since I'd never heard of it.

Comparing not knowing a niche concept to functional illiteracy

Again, this isn't the primary argument I made.

One can make an argument, a logical construction, and then provide an example.

The example is not the argument.

It exemplifies the argument.

Being able to identify what parts of a text serve what purpose... is a part of the skillset of more advanced literacy.

it just comes across as snobbish or elitist.

A person with a broader vocabulary definitionally has a superior level of literacy, as compared to a person who has a smaller vocabulary, all else held equal.

This just literally is part of how literacy is measured.

A person with superior literacy does have an elite level of comprehension, compared to someone with an inferior level of literacy.

You cannot construct a comparative scale of levels of literacy without scores that are higher and lowers than others, sets of concepts they do and do not understand, and can or cannot make use of.

A person who can evaluate integrals in calculus has a superior, elite level of mathematical comprehension, as compared to someone who can only do algebra.

If you have no metric, no measurement, no way to compare levels of ability in a subject... you cannot objectively compare them.

You wanted the conversation to go exactly where you wanted it to go.

You're now presuming to read my inner thoughts, read my mind.

No, I did not.

You are thinking I devised this all as a trap, that I was waiting to spring.

In reality, I woke up, read a reply to a thing I wrote before I fell asleep, and viewed it as an opporunity to further educate people on what literacy is, how this works.

But you have intuited hostile intent from this, probably because you don't like the idea of me explaining to someone that they are not as literate as they think they are, or that its simply insulting to point this out.

To the contrary, understanding what literacy actually is, how it works, how it can be and is measured...

These are fundamental things to grasp if you or anyone is serious about improving their own literacy, or the general literacy of the populace.

This is especially important when a literate public is vital to a functioning democratic society.

You have to understand the nuances, the complexities.

But, if you instead want to attack those you dissgree with, because you do not comprehend what they are saying...

If you want to assume everything is some kind of intentional, personal attack...

Don't expect society or your understanding of it to get any better, any time soon.