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?
Fuck this is actually funny
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
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?
Sudden? That’s been declining for years my dude.
I’m lucky if people understand the first bullet point in my emails. I’m luckier still if they keep reading, never mind understand my next point.
I don’t know man, but I’ll tell you this- I went to the UK to see a punk show and it got cancelled, so I went on the band’s IG to see if there was a post as to why. There was, and as I tried to read some of the comments from users on the post my mind actually melted from how fucked up the spelling was. Not abbreviations, but just a shocking inability to spell very basic words. It’s concerning
I think COVID did a lot of brain damage. People are acting crazier and more reckless in the last few years and I can’t think of any other reason for it.
Some of the earliest studies I read about COVID was how it can enter the brain like meningitis and effect a person’s cognitive functions. This was a while back and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the information, but seeing how much people have seemed to have lost their minds over the last few years makes me think back to that study.
I can’t say I’ve been immune to it either. I have never been “symptomatic”, but the last 3 years have definitely felt more hazy than the times before, and have made me question my own sanity.
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?”
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.
just because they’re not reading comprehensive skills doesn’t mean they’re not learning
I think part of the problem is that so many people nowadays are conditioned to consuming information in bite-sized chunks (eg. tweets), they now just focus on key words and assume they have all the context they need.
It’s akin to the problem I see with technical support help desks, be it the IT support team at work, or my ISP or mobile provider.
They read a few words and parrot the nearest response from their knowledge base/AI bot, and call it a job well done.
I’m literally dealing with this at work right now. Three times on my ticket I’ve been told to undertake a series of steps, which I not only stated I’d done when I first opened the ticket, but I also attached screenshots proving it.
Fucking frustrating.
I disagree, I think Alaska is fairly erogenous
OP, here’s another one! This one’s also pointing out incorrect facts about Arkansas!
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.
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.
to use more simple sentence structure.
to use simpler sentence structure.
use smol words
I don’t understand, what are you trying to say? :(
- 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/
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.
Rampant untreated adult-onset ADHD
I don’t think there is such thing as adult-onset ADHD, people can (and often do) discover it later in life, but they have signs of it all throughout their life.
ADHD symptoms suddenly appearing in adulthood are likely symptoms of another issue, most likely mental and/or neurological disorders, such as depression, traumatic brain injury, MS, etc.
