this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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I've seen posts where I had to assume OP/the commenter wasn't a native English speaker, because of the sentence structure and odd choice of words. A multilingual platform such as lemmy, can sometimes leave you scratching your head. Since I don't speak a 2nd or 3rd language I'm always in awe of polyglots. I always try to offer an olive branch by assuming the fault was mine, and I wasn't clear enough in my wording.
however...
There are people (myself included) who will skim long form texts, rather than actually reading all of the words (thanks to every prof who's ever assigned busy work or HW on a school holiday). I can only speak for myself when I say, once I've skimmed something, if I get to the end and it doesn't add up, I go back and re-read it in its entirety. I have to imagine in a world of 6 billion people, there willl be some who don't choose to re-read the text, and choose outrage...also some people just think it's funny to be contrarian, there's not much you can do about that, other than smile and move along.
Tomorrow you will wake up, the world will be full of promise, and maybe a satisfying breakfast, and you won't even remember [email protected]...they, on the other hand will wake up, and still be them...
I definitely see some clear "this is not their first language" posts, but I don't see a lot of overlap with the semi-literate stuff. They'll usually be pretty close with a missed idiom here or there, an uncommon word that's a slightly odd translation, or have some awkward habit on structure that's pretty consistent but just not quite right in English.
The "can't read" people are all over the place, without coherent structure, and just pull random interpretations out of thin air.
pretty much every time I see someone end a post with "sorry english isn't my first language" the writing was native-grade and I'd have never guessed
Considering busywork, many online texts are unnecessarily long in order to fit as many ads in between as possible. I've encountered texts (even about academic subjects) that are practically unreadable if you don't skim them, because they're not meant to be read closely.
Everyone knows what it's like to look up information on the internet nowadays: most of your time is spent on scrolling or clicking past ads and scanning webpages until you've found a source that's actually useful.
I think a lot of people have been trained to skim online texts because they're designed explicitly to waste your time.