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Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by ThatWeirdGuy1001@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 167 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.ml 75 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Uranium3006@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

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

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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023

723 points (93.3% liked)

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