Asklemmy

No, this talk of "poor reading comprehension" is always such nonsense. Arrogant, defensive nonsense. It's always peddled by people who get huffy when someone disagrees with them. Instead of considering anything wrong about what they said, they conclude that what they wrote is perfectly fine and the issue must be with whoever is criticizing them. And of course the issue is their intelligence. "Surely, no one would disagree with me if they actually understood what I meant! Those heathens ought read a book!"

When people clamour on about reading comp, I always just wonder: How could anyone be that naive? To think that human communication, stripped of the face, the voice, the presence, the context, the body language, reduced to text on a glowing plastic pop tart, would be so straightforward? How do you not see the myriad ways a single line can be interpreted? How do you not recognize the influence of all these different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences can have on how a single line is taken?

How the fuck can you reduce all of the nuance in language and text down to, "Oh, I guess you're just an idiot"? And how many of you are eager to jump on things I say here, such as that word choice "idiot"? As if to say "That word wasn't in the OP, you don't get it!", as if it wasn't a deliberate choiced based on my interpretation of OPs claim, and as if that doesn't just demonstrate the ambiguity of text? Or whatever other protests you'd make - I can think of a dozen things I wrote already that could be misread. I trust you to get it, and I truat you to ask if you don't.

This shit is never simple! Stop reducing it to "reading comprehension" and deflecting all culpability from yourself while simultaneously disparaging others' perspectives. If language were that straightforward, it wouldn't be complex enough to handle human experience.