sugareey- your resident badass

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

I’ve had students tell me they could only get through an article (and not an academic one — short pieces written for popular audiences) by using text-to-speech functions that read it to them. No hate for text-to-speech, obviously; it’s important for accessibility, and I’m definitely not in the “audiobooks don’t count as books” camp. I do suspect, however, based on these students’ responses to the articles, that the way it’s “helping” them is by allowing them to “get through” it by passively listening rather than actively engaging. I’ve even had students admit to having ChatGPT or similar summarize the text for them because they couldn’t understand it.

Class discussions spend more & more time trying to pin down & clarify what the author actually literally said, and correspondingly less time debating different opinions on the reading. I’ve had to ease up on how I evaluate reading responses, gradually moving from “try to say something interesting, insightful, eloquent, &c.” to “try and express your thoughts on the reading rather than summarizing the ‘main idea’, even if those thoughts are ‘it was boring & confusing & I hated it.’” (I’ve also shortened the minimum length of said reading responses, as many students seem to panic & reach for ChatGPT if asked for more than they think they can write in one sitting — which is about a paragraph, apparently.) When I teach literature surveys, I have to introduce students to concepts like close reading & literary analysis, which they have seemingly never been asked to do before.

Part of the issue is definitely that basic literacy is not being taught well in U.S. public schools (cueing, &c.), but beyond that, advanced literacy doesn’t seem to be part of the standard curriculum AT ALL anymore. The “short passages in standardized tests” model mentioned in the original post is kind of… it, at least as far as many students seem to be concerned. Students have told me they’ve never read a novel cover-to-cover, because their secondary education was all centered around selections & excerpts. Likewise, that secondary education never got past the “reading comprehension” phase, and I’m often (according to them) the first instructor to ask them for analysis or even opinion.

Good evening, folks. Time for a One Hour Post- I post I research, craft, write, and publish in under an hour. Today's topic was sent in by @exuberantocean:

Dressing a wound is something nurses get masters degrees in, so to make it something I could do in an hour, I decided to select tourniquets.

Tourniquets are devices used to stop bleeding in a limb. They are commercially available for purchase, but you can also improvise them without too much trouble.

What they look like:

Tourniquets are basically a strip of tough cloth with a windlass- basically a stick- that is used to tighten the cloth around a limb above where the bleeding is. The commercial ones look like this:

How they work:

Inside the upper part of every limb runs a really big artery. That artery's job is to carry blood at high pressure to the rest of the limb. If the artery (or a smaller artery in the lower part of the limb) gets torn or severed, a lot of blood can rush out of it very quickly, causing the person to be at risk of death from blood loss.

A tourniquet puts pressure on that artery- enough that it overcomes the pressure inside the artery (the top number in a blood pressure reading), preventing blood from flowing through it. The blood stops flowing through the artery and can no longer get to the part of the artery that is damaged, and bleeding stops.

When to use one:

There are basically two times you use a tourniquet. Time number one is when other methods to stop arterial bleeding have failed, and the person will die without it.

Tourniquets stop everything below the tourniquet from getting blood. Blood brings oxygen and glucose to a limb and removes metabolic waste. Muscle (the main blood-using thing in a limb) can go many hours without fresh blood before it begins to die, but when you use a tourniquet, a timer does start.

Ideally, you're trying to use direct pressure on a wound first. Direct pressure on an arterial bleed will deprive some tissue of blood (you have to compress the damaged part of the artery to stop bleeding, which will stop blood from getting anywhere downstream, but the artery is already not working well as an artery at this point, so some tissue is just gonna be SOL). Tourniqueting a limb will deprive a lot more tissue of blood, so it's technically the second option. Of course, if there's a spurting wound you can't get under control in a few seconds with pressure, tourniquet is definitely and always better than death.

The second reason you use a tourniquet is logistical. Tourniquets are going to stop bleeding quickly and reliably. So if there's a lot of bleeding people and few rescuers, the rescuers are going to be able to save more people slapping tourniquets on bleeds that maybe technically could have been stopped with pressure if they had been able to devote the time to any single wound. Also, if someone is bleeding somewhere a rescuer can't get to, like if a limb was crushed by a boulder, you can put the tourniquet around that limb and stop the bleeding without needing to be able to see the wound itself.

How to use one:

Take the (commercial) tourniquet and place the strap part around the upper part of the limb. You want the upper limb because there's only one artery there instead of two or more lower in the limb, and it's easier to compress against a single large bone. Tighten it down to finger tightness, then twist the windlass to put more and more pressure on the artery until bloodflow stops.

You know you're done tightening when the bleeding stops. Not slows down, stops completely. There should be no pulse below the site of the tourniquet. In commercial tourniquets there is usually a clip to keep the windlass in place once you've tightened it down enough. Here's a video:

Considerations:

If you put a tourniquet on someone because you could not stop bleeding and were afraid they were going to die, their artery is severely damaged and can't bring enough blood to the tissue below the site of the injury. They need surgery to repair the artery even if the tourniquet is removed. There is no version of this story where they don't get surgery and still get to keep the limb.

Also, without blood to carry it away, waste builds up in the muscle in the limb. When muscle starts to die, cells also release lots of electrolytes (potassium). This toxic soup stays in the limb until the tourniquet is removed, when it is released all at once. This is bad and needs to be accounted for medically.

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

ArtFight 2026 #3 - Viggo for mxxnheart

Below, you will find a complete list of the HPFF Writers' Guild resources, from workshops to external resources, sorted in a table of contents.

Workshops

All workshops are available on The Guild's AO3. They were written and hosted by @venom0usbarbie, @lunapwrites, @allalrightagain, @girl-with-goats, @inmyownlittlecorner5, @bluestringpudding and @voldylockswrites.

They're sorted into two categories: writing workshops and poetry jams.

Writing Workshops

A collection with all the workshops can be found here.

Who's Speaking? A Workshop on Characterisation

Tools of the Trade - A Literary Device Workshop

Alternate Universes: the Workshop

From Fic to Best-Seller: a Marketing Workshop

The Subtle Science of Prep

Grammar Crash Course

Workbuilding Workshop

Smut Workshop

Riddles of the Human Mind

Shades of Grey: Dark & Grey Character Creation

Whose Point of View is it Anyway? A POV Workshop

In Tune with Words: Exploring the Intersection Between Music and Writing

Show and Tell Workshop

An Introduction to Plot-Driven Smut: an NSFW Workshop

Flow May - A Punctuation Workshop

Play with Your Words - A Workshop on Descriptive Writing

The Writer's Guide to Baking an Original Character

January Poetry Jams

A collection with all the poetry jams can be found here.

Poetry Jam #1

Poetry Jam #2

Poetry Jam #3

Poetry Jam #4

Poetry Jam #5

Tagging Guide

Barbie's handy tagging guide is on the Guild's AO3 as well.

You can also peruse the HPFF Writers' Guild — Workshops and Guides and Other Resources tag on AO3 to track down all our AO3 resources.

Drabble Workshops

There are seven drabble workshops, all of which can be found on Tumblr.

The Seven Deadly Drabbles

The Restricted Section

Sing Me a Song

Drabble Limbo

The Dementor's Kiss

Build-A-Story

That's What She Said

External Resources

Masterposts

Directory

Spreadsheet

Individual post links

Harry Potter-focused Resources

Language and Grammar

Plotting, Outlining, and Worldbuilding

Character Building

Technical Tools & Guides and General Writing Resources

This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was taken by Voyager 1, a space probe meant to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. Far from dying, she's still out there doing her job and is the furthest human made object from Earth.

In the mid 80's, they knew Voyager 1 would soon pass beyond where her cameras would matter and she needed to save power, so the question became: what's the last thing she should take a picture of?

Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco both independently had the same thought: take a picture of Earth. Us. Yes, it would be essentially just one pixel. It wouldn't be scientifically useful. It might even damage the camera because of how intense the sun is, even forty times as far from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. But they got it sorted because it's NASA.

3.7 million (not billion) miles away, that's Earth. Caught in bands of light, artifacts of the Sun's incredible power even 4 million miles away. We are an island in a sea of radiation and vacuum and it's all we have.

I can't say it better than Sagan did, so I'll let you alone with his words:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

— Carl Sagan