“Passages [On Failing to Generate Skimmable Content]”

by Ceridwen Hall

My brain makes a bad machine, refusing the platform’s upbeat advice, earning a low skimmability score. The platform recommends fewer paragraphs, more bullet points[1]! It likes gloss and listsicles. My sentences, meanwhile, linger and branch in strange places; small errors reveal here, and hear, the punny unconscious popping into court for a brief statement of discontent.

Skimmability hums and hems—an infinite scroll—embezzling the mind’s hours.

I prefer swimmable texts—like them to ripple and splash. I want some demands made on my heart and lungs, want to encounter the riptides and rapids of fluid imagination. For this I’m willing to risk treacherous waves, to get a little salt in my eyes, where language is dangerous and changeable as water, reverberant with unknowns. My sister told me last week that for centuries we deemed whales solitary loners—but their calls travel thousands of miles underwater. They read the world aloud to one another.

Metaphors, like whale song, remain illegible to SEO; they bloom and echo, mingling categories. Poetry frustrates people because it often looks skimmable (all those short lines!) (all those bright verbs!) but refuses distillation, evades point-seekers. It’s not a spectator sport. There’s nothing to get unless you wade in barefoot and join the poet in choreographing the river’s curves of soundmeaningfeeling. Let the currents tug and cool your ankles.

The skimmable piece is a suburban pool—pleasant and still. Chemically balanced and full of plastic toys, it floats the eyes along. It fawns and asks if you would like clearer skin, a more organized closet. It keeps things light and easy, but sometimes condescends with strategic bolding—as if we were all wayward students tempted to flop down under an oak in the quad and gaze skyward. But I’ve digressed. The quick skim is meant to corral the mind, to fence stock images in a chain of links.

To skim also means to skip rocks—a pseudo flight, an impulse born of boredom—and to pocket petty cash, or to swipe the details off a credit card[2]. The skimmer reaps key points[3] or hunts for personal salience. The skim itself is brief and breathless—all highlights and headlines, the occasional name dropped like a coin in a fountain. Clink and gleam, then the alchemy of forgetting, a layer of green oxide. Our eyes (our egos) glide away as soon as the content has been mined.

The screen—that shining filter—aims to seduce. But the skim itself disembodies; ennui[4] instills a vaguely soothing doomscroll. A spiral and spiral.

Dolphins travel in pods and breathe every twenty seconds while swimming—content I remember from a third-grade reading test; it puzzled me that dolphins could be made boring, reduced to fact and answer. But the skim is a drilled skill. Timed to pull the tides of the child’s mind in, teach her to ignore what fascinates and find what’s being measured. Always the numbers and never the blue song, never the sea breeze. We drink skimmed milk from little boxes at lunch. This is comprehension: calcium and protein, acquired, cataloged. But the body craves apprehension—to jump off the boardwalk and scramble over the dunes, to dogpaddle into the multivalent waves, vestigial tail truing to resonance.

Understanding as (with)standing movement: as with dancing. Not a seamless hour, but one that leaves sand in the brain’s toes.

But the skim spreads across our lives. All surface and category. Given instant access to vast troves, I am tempted to skim—documents, acquaintances, faces, news—and call it strategic. A script kicks in. Squeezed into types and plots, we brand one another, we scan for genre beats rather than the strange drum of the other’s heart. Seeking outrage or affirmation, the skimmer casts projections at a virtual wall and pins labels[5] to it.

Speed strains the eyes. We rush toward a backlit conclusion, rolling, rock-paper-scissors, want-spot-want, left to right down the slope of the site—a furious plummet like the recurring nightmare in which I find myself in the back seat of driverless car barreling toward a dark river and must attempt to steer by thought alone.

I trace the dream to mid-way through my teens, when I lost the ability to read in a moving car, my inner ear suddenly not along for the ride. A nauseating dissonance rose unless I kept my eyes on the road, heeding its music, but ready to brake. Was it carsickness or learning to drive that made a poet of me? I had to navigate between ideas, to weave introspection through outer belt traffic.

On my way past the river, I disappoint the algorithm again: no subheadings, no scrim. Instead, I risk obscurity and invite a solitary reader or two to travel alongside me—to run ahead, if you like, off the edge of the dock.

The reservoir declines to shimmer, but lets the wind scribble and erase a thousand drafts. On its (sur)face, I chart a not-path, leaving the barest hint of wake. Reality is browner and grayer than the digital map, disrupted by soft plops of fish and turtle (the audible rendered visible and ever widening: a heron overhead, and then, higher still, an eagle circles). Later a deer will halt my return journey, staring me down from the center of the road: elegant, narratable. But the water here is marsh-edged—portending mirror and season—where I draw you letter after letter with my paddle, none lasting.

[1] The market loves bullets, their blunt efficiency, their casual urgency—that hint of threat. Phallic, rhythmic, firing practice for targeted advertising.

[2] A transactional reading.

[3] Assuming a hierarchy in which only some facts are worth unlocking, only the front door worth opening.

[4] Half inner-demon, half algorithm.

[5] The market loves labels—their adhesive value, their social cachet—almost as much as bullets.