Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.
They’ll read it and despite all the information being there, if it’s even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it’s complete gibberish or indecipherable.
Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it’s making me lose my fucking mind.
What?
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
Hey, 1970s baseball slugger Oscar Gamble is in da house!
You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It’s just common sense.
Is this what it’s like to have a stroke?
Oh thank goodness I thought it was just me. When I read that I thought ‘dang covid messed me up’
Been a few years since having covid, but my wife and I both feel like we lost some memory and brain power from it, even though we were both vaccinated and had less evere symptoms than others.
In our 30s by the way
nah its a copypasta internet meme from waaay back in the day. Probably like around 2004.
Depends on where really.
This☝️ so true
Wow that genuinely was a struggle to read
It roughly translates, in-context, to “Has any [video game publisher] gone to such lengths to make something so realistic?”
Somebody get this man a doctor, I think he’s had a stroke.
Oh good. I thought it was me.
A stroke of genius?
This comment is psychological warfare.
Such as, the Iraq.
Fuck this is actually funny
Tbh, that was my response lol
I understand what you mean, but I haven’t noticed people not comprehending basic information. Can you give examples?
As a lot of people have already pointed out it’s mostly prevalent in arguments. Like a comment I made on a video about lane splitting on motorcycles.
The video was explaining why lane splitting is safer for cyclists and shows a cyclist get rear ended at a stop light. The title of the video was “Most people don’t understand lane splitting”
I simply commented “No we understand this specific scenario but to continue driving between stopped traffic is completely different”
All the replies to my comment were about lane splitting at a stop sign/stop light. The very thing I specifically stated I understood.
Well that’s sort of a bad example. What your explaining are two separate things. Filtering (moving to the front of a stopped lane by moving between vehicles stopped or by stopping) and lane splitting (moving between lanes at highway speeds).
Iirc filtering is safer but splitting is like way more dangerous but I’d have to look it up.
Legally they are the same.
lane splitting is legal on the highways in california, I don’t know about on all streets. it sounds like maybe you shouldn’t do it on streets where you’d run into stop lights, or generally anything more complex than the interstate. personally I’m always careful whenever I see a motorcycle.
why is lane splitting safer? intuition suggests that treating a motorcycle like a car and giving them the same space or more would be safer, especially since you could predict what they’d do better since it would be the same as a car
I’m not trying to be rude but did you understand what I said? Lane splitting at a stop light/stop sign/stopped traffic is safer for the cyclist. Lane splitting and continuing to drive between the lanes of stopped traffic is not.
When all the cars have stopped, that’s the safest time for the cyclist to slither up to the front of the line. At 20 mph on a crowded freeway, it’s a little more dangerous but legal in CA as long as they don’t go more than (iirc) 20 mph faster than traffic. At 65 mph on a still-crowded LA freeway, having a bike race past you doing 90 can be disconcerting to say the least. At least you know if they cause an accident and you’re injured, they’ll probably be your organ donor.
I have to say I find it ironic that all replies here are about the lane splitting too.
Good evening Ozzy !
I’m afraid there’s nothing new about this, it has been going on for a long time. What I do believe is happening is now that every idiot with a cell phone can jump of sites like lemmy or reddit, we are simply seeing a lot more examples of the problem. Pretty much like when camcorders became affordable to the general public, we suddenly saw all kinds of police brutality videos and some people thought this must be a recent trend when in fact it had been occurring all along.
One of my last comments on Reddit was about this.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that people have stopped reading sentences. They’ll read all the words and then upvote based on the feeling those individual words give them. They won’t consider the meaning of all those words put together.
And yeah, “upvote does not mean agree” is something Reddit has always struggled with, but it has definitely had exponential growth lately.
It has made me start writing more clearly. There are comments I’ve written that have been wildly misinterpreted from my actual meaning. Part of that is that I tend towards sarcasm, and it doesn’t translate well over the internet no matter how absurd I get with it. But I’ve also started aiming to use more simple sentence structure.
to use more simple sentence structure.
to use simpler sentence structure.
use smol words
Why use many word, when few word do trick?
One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.
And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.
My biggest upvotes were always jokes. If I tried to make reasonable points about anything, or god forbid, shared my experiences - I was downvoted into oblivion and people would actively comment to tell me how much they hated my way of thinking or just repeat to me that I need therapy as if going to therapy harder was some how the answer.
Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.
“do better” is my personal ragebait.
So many people where I live over use that shit.
If I tried to make reasonable points about anything, or god forbid, shared my experiences - I was downvoted into oblivion
Introducing quotes from authors that were related to the subject would really show how people were locked in the context of media immediacy, the environment. Links to outside citations would almost always generate replies from people who obviously did not study the citation and just wanted to respond back.
It used to be something people said ‘out loud’ about people not reading links and just commenting… then it just became normalized.
oh yeah the good ol’ [citation needed] meme even though they were already given a damn citation.
Such an obvious sign of someone just responding to respond. Relies on repeating memes as a crutch and can’t have a real discussion about a a topic.
I’ve had the same experience with people (intentionally or otherwise) misinterpreting what I said to mean something completely opposite. And I call them out on it every time, like seriously did you even READ what I said or did you just see a few words and insert your own beliefs into what you thought I was going to say? I’ve actually had some people admit that yes, they did indeed quickly skim without letting the actual words sink in.
It’s really a shame that you’re reducing your writing to the lowest common denominator. Sure there may be times when there’s a reason for that (Earth not flat, dummy), but the rest of the time it drags down the whole conversation to a level where it’s difficult to have a meaningful discussion. If someone is really trying to grasp a concept but they’re missing it then of course you need to drop out of the technical jargon to help them get up to speed, but the ones who are there just to ridicule and troll simply aren’t worth the effort to explain simple concepts to (such as your opinion on women’s reproductive rights is meaningless, the only opinion that matters is that of the woman who is affected by the issue). Keep up the high-quality discussions and ignore everyone who doesn’t make the effort to keep up!
IMO, many (most?) people quite simply don’t think about things. They just have some dogmatic positions they’ve taken for some reasons, and they regurgitate them as necessary.
And that’s a lot of the reason that they so often and so brazenly misinterpret things other people say. They’re not actually reading to comprehend - they’re reading just to get enough of a feel for it to classify it, so that they’ll have some (potentially quite wrong) idea of which bit of rhetoric to trot out in response to it.
You are not wrong. Reading what you typed, I can’t help but think about the people who have spent so much time defending their self-serving opinions that they can no longer have any reaction other than to start arguing. My ex had a bad case of bi-polar. She was really a great person, but any time someone disagreed with her (or even if she thought they were disagreeing) a switch would flip and she would rage at you until she thought she had won. Even walking away wasn’t enough because then she wanted an admission that she was right. Funny thing was that after that had passed and she calmed down, you could talk to her rationally and she could see your point, but it simply wasn’t worth the effort.
Sure, there’s that. Also, sometimes I just write bad.
There’s a difference between simplifying a message and writing at a lower reading comprehension level. I think a lot of accidental incomprehension might just be caused by the reader not being very good at reading English.
In my country (and I think the whole EU), government agencies have to write at a B1 level to make sure official publications and letters are accessible to all citizens. I think that’s a good rule of thumb for online conversations as well. (However, writing pleasant prose at B1 level is a whole different beast. Generally, they’re not very good at it.)
Good point on catering to those who speak other languages, I hadn’t considered that.
So what does a B1 level equate to? I’m assuming it’s lower than college level, probably lower that a high school level? Are we talking like middle school, grade school, or something else?
Sorry, didn’t get a notification.
Yeah, it’s basically at high school level, so most of the adult population should be able to understand it without much issue.
No worries, thanks for the update. Yeah that makes sense, we would hope that most people make it through high school, although the way they’re going in some parts of the US by gutting the education and white-washing history (they’re actually trying to teach kids that slavery was a GOOD thing!!!) I feel like in a few years a high school education here is going to be meaningless.
It’s really a shame that you’re reducing your writing to the lowest common denominator
yeah
At times I’ve been considering using spoiler mechanics to write a “simple English” reply, followed by the actual answer, hidden for only the more discerning reader to uncover.
Keep up the high-quality discussions and ignore everyone who doesn’t make the effort to keep up!
Yup. This is the only way. Those people are just trying to get responses. The only way to get win is to not give them what they want.
there’s also the problem of people not reading it in the first place, and the problem of people intentionally misinterpreting what you say in bad faith. those aren’t literacy issues
I was a strong advocate for rediquette for a long time, but the site kept attracting new people who didn’t give a shit about it. You can’t fight the tides of change, I guess.
Unmarked sarcasm via text is just always a bad idea. People don’t realize how much body language, tone, and to an extent history with the person, goes into recognizing sarcasm IRL.
When you remove all of that context… it’s often just an extremely dumb statement, and I for one am just going to take you at your word, because too many people really do mean whatever it is you just said.
It’s also terrible because you get a comment like “I guess the earth really is flat” which maybe 99% of people take as sarcasm, and then the one flat earther or borderline flat earther comes along and goes “wow, lots of people are getting behind this movement!”
You should use emojis to convey sarcasm 🙄
Yeah, I feel the sarcasm thing. I used to use a lot more absurdist humor but over the past decade it’s become increasingly pointless and even counterproductive as Poe’s law moves along with the Overton window of stupidity. Stuff that used be recognized as obvious satire before gets taken much too seriously far too often now.
It helps to use only happy nice words. A happy sentence is an objective sentence, free from judgements or pronouns.
“You watch that stupid thing too much.”
Starts with a pronoun, contains “stupid”, ends with a judgement. It’ll make people furious and it’s not the content for them but the trigger words they scan for.
“Maybe we could go outside instead of watching TV?”
Same reasoning behind why you said it, different responses sometimes.
At work if I ask 2 questions in an email I’m guaranteed 1 or 0 answers.
My boss is horrible about this. He also doesn’t organize his inbox in conversation view so he’ll randomly pop up in different parts of an ongoing thread and can’t keep track of what people are talking about.
You should fire your boss. Sounds like they’re not a great fit.
OMG fr. I’ll ask my boss, shall we do option 1,or option 2? and he’ll write back, Yes.
Actchually, that is a perfectly correct response according to propositional calculus.
One or the other? Yes, one or the other.
That’s not just reading comprehension. People are always answering my questions with unapplicable answers.
“Is it on the left or the right?”
“It’s 67, the one with grass in the yard.”
Just answer the damn question rather than providing me other information you decide would be more helpful!
Maybe because there’s 10 kinds of email replies at your workplace
Hah!
Yep. I’ve noticed this in maybe the last 3-4 years. I’ve actually wondered if i’ve started getting dyslexia.
I think realistically it’s more to do with the way I use the internet. I scan articles rather than read them unless it’s something i’m really interested in. Google search results, half of them tend to be bullshit so i’ve gotten good at scanning them at insane speed.
Yeah, I literally began typing this response before finishing your post.
…
It’s like with increased information we’ve learned to scan for relevance a lot better, but at the expense of overall comprehension.
Like it gets us by, and gets us through the excess in time.
But, when emotions fly? It’s getting volatile.
Massively! I used to read loads of books now I struggle to get through them at all.
I find it easier to listen to a podcast and scan the internet barely taking any information in from either. I have to really concentrate to do either now. I am working at it. Treating reading articles/podcasts as more of a hobby where I try dedicate some time to it where that’s my only focus.
Yes. For years now. And I am horrified.
I am a teacher and I’ve had students who could not find the article about lions from the animal encyclopedia I handed to them. And when I helped them to find it, one started crying, one tried to read it (stopped after a minute or so) and one asked “Isn’t there some lion video we could watch instead?”. It was two pages with a lot of pictures. But it was too much for these 5th graders.
Reading proper books has become almost impossible to kids because their attention span is almost non-existent with written material.
We’ve tried to add more emphasis on basic reading skills in the early grades for some time now, but it seems to have very little effect.
Is this actually due to attention span, or are these children basically illiterate?
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don’t know there’s anything wrong with it.
Jesus. That theory is the one my professors talked about in university, as an example of “how to never teach anyone anything”.
You’re on Internet. Many people are not native English speaker.
Secondly, people are saying this kind of shit litteraly since anciant Greece. You’re late to the party. They complained about it in each and every place of the western world at every time we have written records to read that shit. It’s seriously amazing how this trope is one of the most consistent of the history of mankind. And it doesn’t depend on the language obviously.
Iirc, even the Greeks bemoaned the written word because it harmed physical memory and made out brains weak because we could just consult tablets lazily instead of memorizing everything.
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept13/2013/09/29/socrates-writing-vs-memory/
Socrate said that apparently. Fortunately they weren’t all idiots so we now know that they would also say stupid things.
One of my tasks at work is creating content - blogs, social media posts, internal communication emails, etc. We are instructed to write everything at a 5th-grade level because that’s where the average American reads. Not the lowest-level American, the average.
I also get to do customer support for people who would not have to contact me if they had actually read the information I wrote for them.
I’m a nurse and we were taught to educate patients at the fifth grade level as well. Believe it or not, the sex ed level is even lower! The average American seems to struggle with such topics as “it’s bad to touch or be touched when the person being touched doesn’t like it” and “don’t put random household objects in your butthole.”
Instructions unclear, my colon has an amazing idea according to my x-ray tech.
johnconnor.gif: “We’re not gonna make it, are we? Humanity I mean.”
I don’t know if it’s at a 5th grade level, but the XKCD comic has an editor that flags words that are not in the top 500 most used words. The author used it in a few comics to explain complicated things in “plain English”.
I’d say that would be useful, but using it would be depressing so it sounds like a double-edged sword.
Sudden? No. It’s always been very, very bad.
Literally the comment I was going to write
Yes, I’ve been having trouble concentrating on reading, and understanding written text, ever since I started chemotherapy. They tell me the brain fog could last between four and ten years.
I’m also reading that some long COVID sufferers are having similar effects. I’ve managed to avoid COVID so far, hoping that I won’t get anything that makes the brain fog worse.
I think he was asking if you notice this happening more in general interactions with others, not in yourself. Can’t tell if this is a good example of what he’s talking about.
But why male models?
It’s only going to get worse. 20% of the US is illiterate. 50% can’t read above a 6th grade level.
Read that again.
1 in 2 people can not read above a 6th grade level.
That is a fucking insane statistic.
It’s only going to get worse. 20% of the US is illiterate. 50% can’t read above a 6th grade level.
I believe it.
When I watch TikTok, the video will explain everything extremely clearly, and the comments are FILLED with questions or criticism that were answered or done in the video.
My favourite is when I comment on a Canadian TikTok page about something, and someone else comments “ughhh it’s not illegal here and it’s $5” and I reply with “what province?” and they respond “Texas”. Like bitch, you’re on a CANADIAN page, with the person clearly talking about CANADA, and you’re talking about something unrelated in Texas telling me that I am wrong?
That is quite insane. You got sources?
Top hit on google: https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics#:~:text=Top 10 U.S. Literacy Rate,literacy below sixth-grade level.
Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
There’s a bunch of other studies out there that back that number…It’s always generally 20% can’t read at all…50% can’t do critical analysis of text.
It’s really ugly…Those people all vote, and I think it helps explain how the most vile ridiculous demons the R’s put out there get 30%+ of the vote. It’s extremely hard to refute lies when the person consuming and believing the lie can’t read.
Read more about it here. A reminder, if you can’t find the sample size then disregard the source.
That site is showing literacy improvement for 4th graders since 2003. It also says “21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate in 2022.” but then another graph showing “United States 86.0 %” in global ranking of literacy. It’s just a hodgepodge of stats being semi-sourced with little to no conext, it even includes Wikipedia as a source.
I’m not saying there’s no literacy problems in the US, I just don’t know what to make of that site specifically.
And 1 in 5 can’t even read!
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Cannot read English? Well that makes sense. The US is filled with immigrants and non English speaking citizens
I’ll take the average immigrant’s reading level over the average conservative’s reading level.
- English not the first language for about 7.5 billion people on this planet.
- More people with English as a second or even third language have a higher reading and comprehension level than the average USAian
- Many people simply do not know how to write correctly, which only exacerbates the problem
The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level.
https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/
54% of US adults only have a sixth grade competency level in reading. 21% of US adults are functionally illiterate.
Talking about the 3rd option I think that’s the opposite problem actually. People adhere to the formal rules of the English language so strongly that a slightly incorrect sentence becomes incomprehensible to them.
Me can create word lines by using wrong words.
That sentence should not be hard to understand if you’re actually fluent in English. Yet I see more and more people being completely lost and confused like they never even tried to understand in the first place.
Kinda like a spelling error in their there and they’re. Contextually you should understand which one they meant regardless of mistakes.
There is no way they’re being too formal with their writing.
It’s not that they’re being too formal it seems that they’re thinking too formal.
Like they can’t decipher things like a multi use word or an obvious autocorrect mistake.
If we were talking about birds and I suddenly started using the word bards you should be able to figure out contextually that I’m still talking about birds.
Edit: also formal isn’t the right word. I specifically used fluent because fluently speaking a language means being able to deduce the meaning of a word through context.
Formal is not the word your looking for. Literal. People interpret the words literally. The can’t/ don’t understand figurative language like sarcasm, symbolism and metaphor.
Remember when the internet used to be wall of texts. People used to write like writers do. Sentences and paragraphs that comprise a distinct idea. A collection of paragraphs that elucidate the point of view in their head… These days the style of writing online is some kind of line-by-line disjointed train of thoughts. Something resembling a collection of 140 character social media posts. I find it more difficult to grok. Impossible at times. It’s like people aren’t writing for readers. They’re brain dumping one liners off the top of their head.
The reason for this could be that people who are smart enough to write something comprehensible is most likely not going to do so because of the risk of getting comments from brain dumping people. Social media has given everyone a megaphone - even the dumbest individuals. They keep pouring their stupidity onto the internet for everyone to see.
It also doesn’t help that you have meme texts that people will drop and derail the entire point.
“Long detailed documentation meant to generate intellectual conversation”
“Generate deez nuts 😂😂🤣🤣🤣😭😭”
Gottem.
I wonder of more and more people using cellphones for social media has affected this? I use my cellphone primarily and…I definitely don’t write my finest work, shall we say. The typos are aplenty too since I type furiously. I’m investing in a laptop for this very reason. I miss having more robust writing skills.
Sudden? No. Been dropping off since Reagan started the anti-education push his masters wanted? Yes. The illiteracy and lack of critical thinking skills have (intentionally) been instilled, or removed depending on your viewpoint, from the educational process worldwide. And as usual… the ‘wealthy’ “have a plan”.
What is the anti education push and how does it manifest?
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For me it’s scanning vs. reading. Too often I’ll think I’ve read something, react to it, only to see after the fact that I missed something because I was in fact -not- reading but scanning. Email is an example. I get so much of it, I scan and skim, and inevitably get bit by this bad habit, often more than once a day. It’s a disservice to the person e-mailing me, I know, but there are a LOT of people and I suppose the (poor) rationale is that at least everyone is getting some attention. I know it’s better to get to what I can and things that I can’t just need to wait.
