Skimming and mistakes in everyday work

Almost nobody reads the whole email, and the office pays for the mistake

The results of the PIRLS test left an uncomfortable headline: Spanish children's reading comprehension has worsened since 2016. The diagnosis, however, is easily recognised in office work. A professional at an advertising agency tells it without embellishment: failed deliveries because someone skim-read the briefing, assignments for five mockups completed with three, and the feeling of writing instructions as if they were children's textbooks. Bullets, bold, underlining, reading hierarchies. All so that, if people skim, they at least get the gist.

The underlying question is no longer whether people read. It is whether they understand what they read, and how much it costs when they don't.

Comprehension errors that cost money and time

The starting account describes the routine of someone who writes briefs and later checks that they haven't been processed as expected. The direct consequence is repeated work and constant monitoring by the sender, who ends up chasing others to verify whether they understood the task. The anxiety described by the writer doesn't come from the workload, but from the suspicion that their message will be ignored by default.

There is a nuance worth not losing: it is not that people don't know how to read, but that they don't give each text the time it requires. Skim-reading works when the message is simple and fails when the message has conditions.

Two attention circuits: why we skim

Cognitive neuroscience offers an explanation that has nothing to do with laziness. Charo Rueda Cuerva, a professor at the Universidad de Granada and author of Educar la atención con cerebro, describes two systems: one captures external stimuli instantly, is superficial and allowed us to survive in nature; the other enables deep processing, aligned with our goals and conscious decisions. Today we almost always run on the first.

The parking example sums it up: if we always leave the car in the same place, we don't use attentional resources; if we move it, we discover we don't know where it is. Something similar happens with short messages. They land well, are processed effortlessly, but train an ephemeral attention that doesn't last over time.

“People writing fast for people reading in a hurry”

Cristina Vela Delfa, from the Department of Spanish Language at the Universidad de Valladolid, admits she doesn't know of reports measuring the phenomenon in adults, but her intuition is that the decline has reached them too. Accelerated reading is always worse than unhurried reading, and multitasking reduces concentration capacity in both adults and children. Her diagnosis is an explosive combination: people writing quickly for people reading quickly.

Add to that the economy of the message. Writing many vague emails is more comfortable for the sender than writing one single, specific and complete email. The sender doesn't include the details that would prevent doubt, and the receiver has neither the time nor the inclination to compensate for that lack with their own effort.

Group chats and the noise that erases information

Thibaut Deleval, a lawyer, teacher and author of Distraídos, has seen the problem in his own home: his daughter deciphering the steps for Erasmus, date mix-ups (“which Tuesday, this one or next?”) and travellers sitting in the wrong place because they didn't read two coordinates. In group chats things get worse, because conversations cross, some messages contradict others, and retrieving a piece of information is almost impossible.

His conclusion is harsh: some people don't even bother to read and ask so that others reconstruct the information. He himself speaks of a certain disregard for other people's time. Short messages, moreover, have trained people to write with less depth: a recipe isn't read the same way as a love letter.

It isn't only a Spanish problem

One participant says he has worked in three countries with three languages of different roots — Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Slavic — and argues that the pattern repeats everywhere. At the end of a call he asks if there are any doubts and no one answers; later, no one knows where the project stands, and the result is delays, frustration and a search for blame.

Against that, another participant argues the opposite of what seems obvious: the longer a brief is, the more errors it generates. Brief, clear instructions, and those who receive them make fewer mistakes. According to this participant, that is the first thing to keep in mind when commissioning work.

Is it saturation, education or bad briefs?

Here the analysis splits. One camp blames overload: there are too many emails, too many series, too much of everything, and the brain has adapted to filter. Another points to a training deficit and a linguistic level worse than that of previous generations. A third points to the sender: if the message was confusing, the error belongs to whoever wrote it.

There are also those who recall that the expression leer en diagonal (skim-reading) is recent in everyday speech, that people used to say simply 'at a glance', and those who reduce the whole matter to one line in the hope that someone will summarise it for them. The only firm measurement available is the children's one: the decline since 2016.

No one has managed to prove how much of this is lack of effort and how much is simply too much noise. And meanwhile, the email with five mockups is still waiting for an answer.