Asklemmy

If three astronauts are flying over the Gobi Desert in a canoe and they crash, how many pancakes does it take to shingle a dog house?

The answer is purple, because ice cream has no bones.

Yes. I work in tech doing chat support. No one can fucking read. Or if they can, they suffer from selective reading where they just pick a word or phrase out of a message and fucking hone in on it like a missile strike and then they completely miss the context of what they were being told. They almost always have to have things reexplained because they just don't grasp reading a message and then understanding what it said.

Then when I'm online outside of work, I notice most people lack catching nuance when reading. This was especially true on Reddit and something I don't miss from there at all. Makes having a conversation online like pulling teeth.

I think the comprehension issues are partly to blame for writing issues: people don't understand what they're writing, and then why it's not what they're (probably) thinking.

If you see people apparently unable to understand sloppy writing, maybe it's just they're fed up.

Toss a good 'litchally' or 'emails' or 'backupped' into the post and I'm all but done.

It may have something to do with a change in how we teach kids to read in the USA about 20 years ago.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

This isnt new. Anyone who has been on a dating site or app in the last 20-30 years will have stories to tell.

The same applies with ads for almost anything. I can recall advertising a property to let in the early 2000's, the ad started with the line "Non-smokers wanted for non-smoking property" or something similar, and I repeated the non-smoking thing or variations of it over a dozen times within the ad. A couple turned up to look at it, both carrying cigarette packets, one actually smoking on arrival.....

It is not exactly sudden, it's creeping for the last 20, 30 years.

I have noticed it, but it's not happened suddenly.

There's so much to read, it makes sense that our brains would start filtering things out.

Yes, I've noticed this too. A lot of this. I might not have English as my first language, but the signs point to grammar not being an issue, most often people complain I use words with looser connections to what I mean to say. With this, people act like my sentences are impossible math equations. They don't want to hear about how those can be solved as long as nothing breaks the rules of formulation. The cherry on top is when they say something demeaning like "come back when you can say something comprehensible", never "could you clarify?"

I am inclined to think that easy entertainment and a devaluation of the intellectual life (it is no longer admirable nor sufficiently valuable being an intellectual) can be a partial explanation. The first one leads to distractions and our time being occupied by mindless activities. The second keeps us there as people are indifferent to studying and asking questions. It has become a personal choice, a kind of hobby or trait of certain individuals, and not something that we all should be doing. And I'm not saying that everyone should be a Leonardo da Vinci excelling in philosophy, sciences, arts, etc.; but I do believe we should be thinking critically and informing ourselves to the extent possible, otherwise, our reading comprehension and many other things get affected.

I'm sorry if my grammar betrays my words, I am not a native speaker.

That said, I think these are some of our obstacles, but other times had had their own obstacles. I'm sure the average citizen from, I don't know, Istanbul, London, Tokyo, some centuries ago was also very opinionated and ignorant of many things. It has been the constant, the rule, for millennia.

Yes, I've noticed a relatively large drop in reading comprehension among my close friends and family, and in the community in general. It goes hand in hand with the excessively banal small talk and their sudden inability to think critically. It's almost like they've been hypnotized or brain drained. It certainly is a cause for concern.

If you're American, this may be why. 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade level.

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

You are seeing the effect of America's deeply rooted culture of anti-intellectualism and the decades-long Republican crusade to gut the public schooling system.

Actually, I've started to notice this in myself, rather than in others.

It's also possible that the method of communication is just changing. I've found that often I have more trouble communicating in written form than conversationally, and I wonder if that's because of zoom and video essays, not to mention shorts / TickTok becoming more prevalent. I've also had my writing degrade just because I don't have a place or reason to exercise it as much. So what I'm writing is perhaps less comprehensible because it's more like a stream of consciousness.

Or more likely it's both - people don't do long form or even "hard" reading anymore, and so find more complex text incomprehensible.

That kind of sounds like someone not being able to write / express themselves properly is trying to shift the blame on the readers.

I get this all the time. Too often I'll even get someone trying to pick a fight with me, but if they actually read my post they would find I agree with them. Either that or they'll bring up a point I already addressed in my post.

There's a certain point where if I feel someone's not comprehending what I'm writing, continuing the conversation is a waste of my time. Even insulting them would require literacy on their end.

I think this because of doomsday scrolling on our smartphones, we have ruined our ability to focus and concentrate.