Aranday 1

Ricardo Aranday

Professor Ortiz

ENGL-1301-66

October 15, 2021

Inquiry

Have you ever been distracted? Of course you have, everyone has been distracted at one

point. We are now distracted more than ever in this new era of distractions that surround all of us.

In society, it is almost taboo to mention how addicted we are to the distractions around us. So, have

you ever sat down and wondered, “How do distractions actually affect me?” That is why my

question is, “How do distractions and disruptions affect the writing and reading process?” My

connection to this question is that I have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), meaning

that distractions are something that can affect me easily. I hate to oversimplify, but I would rather

not get side-tracked. In this paper, I will be using 3 academic sources to show what research on

groups of people has shown and 2 popular sources to show what individual people think. In this

paper I will be discussing how I believe that distractions are mostly negative to the reading and

writing process but some that reason may come from the source.

Before going in, I want to explain that distractions and disruptions is absolutely everything that

gets in your way from what your task is. This can include pets, hunger, your phone, noisy

environments, and mind wandering. To begin, disruptions cause us to lose our focus and make

mistakes, some of which we might not see until it’s too late. And because we are distracted, we

read and write less since we have less time to read and write. In research from SÖRQVIST et al.,

they conducted an experiment with 48 university students by having them write three stories for
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minutes each and wrote based on three images displayed on a computer screen while having three

sets of sound conditions being silence, normal speech, and rotated speech (2012). They took things

like aspects of writing, corrections and errors, and pauses into consideration, and their results

showed that a complex task like writing is indeed sensitive to noise, with normal speech showing

the worst results out of the three, but only by 80% (2012). This experiment answers the writing

part of my question by clearly showing that disruptions will have a negative impact on the writing

process but maybe not as much as I expected. So now let’s look at how it affects the reading

process. In an experimental study, eighty-nine college students were used to study how instant

messaging affects the reading process and they were randomly assigned one of three conditions

being, IM before reading, IM during reading with an IM on average every twenty seconds, or no

IMs to read a near four-thousand-word passage (Bowman, et al 2010). The results were that those

who did IM during reading performed the worst out of the group in terms of time to read and test

results by 25-59%, however, those who did IM before the reading finished the passage the quickest

and was given the explanation that they experienced a “warm up” (2010). This is the most

important piece of evidence to me because of its bigger gap from writing. Reading is a big part of

learning, and this study shows just how distractions will greatly affect your ability to grasp a

concept as shown by the results. I bring up how reading is a big part of learning because my next

source is about how we let ourselves become distracted because it a reflection of how feel

disengaged. A research study surveyed 143 people and did 10 interviews to describe how they use

their smartphones in writing classrooms (Green, 2019). In the survey he conducted, he found that

79-92% of students use their smartphones to text and use social media at frequency that isn’t zero

(2019). Many of the students he interviewed said that failure from a professor to make a make

course content relatable, understandable, or engaging, led to them turning to their phones as a
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source of distraction, and they advocate for lecturers to use change up teaching methods and

models (2019). This connects to the writing and reading process because the way a lecturer teaches

will be reflected in our reading and writing by showing disinterest in the topic. My theory was that

distractions and disturbances would be negative to the writing and reading process but some of its

issues may lie in the source. My sources currently show how distractions and disturbances will

negatively affect the writing and reading processes, but not all of it may your fault. The first source

showed how noises can negatively affect your writing but not drastically with only an 8%

difference. The second source shows how being distracted will great affect the reading process

with lower scores and reading times. And the third source shows how the source work can be the

reasoning for being distracted. My theory solved most of its main questions, but it’s not done.

A paper on this is really important because of how the modern era we live in built on being

distracted. Of course, being distracted doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it is just that nobody ever

talks about addicted we are to it, but this is something I believe will change within the next 10

years. I believe this research paper can help people find what distracts them in general and shows

them how big of an impact that distractions leave on them when it comes to the reading and

writing process.
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Currently, I only used my academic sources since I’m not too sure about popular sources yet

Bibliography:

Bowman, Laura L., et al. “Can Students Really Multitask? An Experimental Study of Instant

Messaging While Reading.” Computers and Education, vol. 54, no. 4, 2010, pp. 927–31,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.024.

Green, McKinley. “Smartphones, Distraction Narratives, and Flexible Pedagogies: Students’

Mobile Technology Practices in Networked Writing Classrooms.” Computers and

Composition, vol. 52, 2019, pp. 91–106, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2019.01.009

SÖRQVIST, PATRIK, ANATOLE NÖSTL, and NIKLAS HALIN. “Disruption of Writing

Processes by the Semanticity of Background Speech.” Scandinavian Journal of

Psychology, Received 23 May 2011, accepted 22 November 2011, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012, pp.

97–102, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2011.00936.x.

[TEDx Talks]. (2019, June 24). Burnout: How Addiction to Distraction is Eroding our Capacity |

Melanie Sodka | TEDxWindsor [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eOcpZXrq-E

[The Merry Writer Podcast]. (2022, March 23). How Do You Deal With Writing Distractions? |

Ep. 104 | The Merry Writer Podcast. YouTube. Retrieved October 2, 2022, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btq7glYRvFY