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Reading Comprehension


Uaithne
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This might be a bit of a silly confession, but I have really low reading comprehension, all things considered.  I speak English as my first language, but I have some difficulties fully comprehending posts and their meanings.  Normally I miss words, or phrases, or I don’t really follow the entire thought of the post.  In the end, meanings get misconstrued, and I have my characters react inappropriately for the real situation, and I miss obvious cues and details that affect the plot.

 

What is your experience with reading comprehension and roleplaying, either in yourself or in others?

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I find this is give and take and honestly since it's all text sometimes words are missed to give proper clues to what is happening. I find that if I feel I'm questioning how my character should reply I will poke the writer and ask questions. "Are they talking to the NPC or my character? I couldn't tell." Or sometimes things won't be written at all but are needed for proper reaction so I ask those to "What sort of look does he have on his face?" etc.

 

Really comprehension is not always about missing the point but sometimes missing the content.

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It happens to me too sometimes. Either for being tired, or for reading in a foreign language and associating words differently.

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I never seem to realize it in the moment, but I've gone back on old threads and realized I've done this. Like I've just completely misinterpreted a post and my character's response is way out in left field. I've found I do better when I copy paste the important bits of the previous post into wherever I'm writing my post so there is less information to focus on and I can reference it the entire time I'm writing.

 

When I'm on the receiving end, I think it's interesting when a response doesn't match what I intended, because it gives me a chance to go back and figure out how I could have written the scene better. A lot of the time I can pinpoint exactly where my post could have been made clearer for the other person.

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@firefly - Thanks so much.  Those are great ideas.  It never occurred to me to fish out the important information in a post.  Sometimes I go back and review what I wrote that was misleading or interpreted the wrong way, too.  Very rarely do I correct people.  Right now I'm focusing on trying to write settings with enough detail that other people can figure it out.

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I do what firefly does, not because of my reading comprehension but because I'm a skimmer. I skim read instead of reading in detail. It's an awful habit I've picked up over the years. Doing a reply like that not only lets you mull over the comprehension you might have missed but allows your brain to have a refresher on what it's already read.

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One thing I have found is that people sometimes skimp on detail and it makes it difficult to comprehend their writing. I sometimes worry if I've written too much and I think it always helps to go back over your partner's post to see if you've missed anything, or if something you've put contradicts them. (I remember writing a post once and thinking that my partner had written theirs a certain way, only to find out what I'd written contradicted them, so I changed it.) It's always best to double check.

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I feel like I have the opposite problem here and tend to overthink posts and replies. But there have been times where I've gone back to threads and thought "what was I thinking? How did that make sense to me at the time?"

 

But I also love it when someone misinterprets my posts. It usually provides a totally different perspective to what happened that I in no way anticipated. And it can take a thread in a whole new direction. For example, I was once in a thread where (I thought) my character was shamelessly hitting on another character, totally suave and flawless and there was no doubt he was going to get into this other character's pants. And somehow the writer I was in this thread with totally misinterpreted what I was saying and the thread ended up with my character seriously wounded and in the hospital for the next several months. No matter what I threw at her, she took it as my character being hostile and, while at the end I was like "wtf just happened???" it was one of the most exciting and weirdest threads I've ever written. It ended up being hilarious and she and I still talk about it. I later learned the other writer was on some heavy drugs at the time due to an injury, so her comprehension and memory for a lot of things was out of whack. But I've learned to roll with it. 

 

In the end, you're working on a collective story, and you take what you can from it. Unless the other writer is giving me absolutely nothing to work with, I think it's fun and provides endless opportunity to make whatever you want happen. If I have a specific question about something, I'll ask before I write it, but I'm less concerned with what someone else has written before me and how they understood it and more concerned with what I'm going to write to react to it.

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