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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 14 points 7 months ago (9 children)

He specifically says, "with full comprehension", so, like I said.

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[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (8 children)

Full comprehension just means you gathered the intent of the point the writer was trying to get across. You can easily do that with 20% of the words they wrote if you pick the right words. Scanning is basically training to find all the important words to fully piece together the idea as quickly as possible.

So 25 words per second may sound like alot, but it's really the time necessary to find 5 words per second out of the crowd of 25. And like any other skill, it is something you get significantly better at with practice. Lawyers are gonna have alot of practice if they work on a skill like this.

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[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 2 points 7 months ago

Lawyering is well known to be a profession where words really aren't important so you can miss out every other one and still just get the gist. No court case has ever been decided by pedantry over wording or meaning in legal texts after all.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

Full comprehension implies - to me at least - that you are not just picking up the "intent of the point" but also subtler cues. No, you don't need to read every single word in order to do that but 1500 words a minute with full comprehension is still horseshit.

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[–] Paragone@piefed.social 2 points 7 months ago

There are some people who can do page-at-a-time comprehension.

But I suspect that with lawyers, it is instead that it isn't words they are comprehending, rather, it is phrases which changes the whole equation.

I guarantee you that in legalese, there are a gazillion boilerplate/stock phrases, & once one recognizes the phrase, one can skip past it to see what that-"atom" pertains to.

Same as how, in music, one can see a particular phrase or series-of-phrases, & just flow through the playing of that, from one's programming, not bothering to concern oneself with the sheet-music until that phrase/series-of-phrases is ended.

I've encountered enough diversity-in-mental-capability that I'm not balking at that claim of theirs: it's possible from what I've encountered among others.

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[–] TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 2 points 7 months ago

It's either that, or Legalese has an enormously low entropy.

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[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 point 7 months ago (3 children)

Also specified "dense scientific text".

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[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

Still has just as many predictable connective words you dont have to pay much attention to. And as long as you are familiar with all the terms you are encountering, it only makes a pretty small difference whether they are plain english or heavily latin derived.

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[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

That's not what "dense" means to me. Maybe it's just my mathematician bias, but I don't consider a text where less than 50% of the words are precise and non-trivially functional to be "dense".

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[–] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ah, I suppose if it's artificially created for whatever specific speed-test environment or something. But I just assume they would use the real structure of language for those. So I took his use of dense as being a somewhat redundant descriptor with scientific language(though likely leaning more towards heavily polysyllabic words). I figure, if one interpretation of the words he used leads to what he said making sense, and another leads to it not making sense, why assume he meant the latter?

Not to mention we're almost all Autistic here, so having random individual 'off the charts' abilities is gonna be pretty much the norm.