Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?
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.
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.
This post was actually conceived after a large amount of people were confused by a 4chan green text meme. The information was all there just not written in the average sentence structure. Also I’m generally very good at making sure I’m understood and will even change my word choice for better understanding.
So if it wasn’t written in the average sentence structure, why is that poor reading comp and not poor writing comp? Couldn’t you argue either one, depending on who you want to criticize?
How can you say you’re good at making sure you’re understood and yet also say people struggle with reading comp? Are you saying that people don’t struggle with your words, but you watch them struggle with things others wrote that you understand? Are you sure about that? Or are you drawing self-serving conclusions here?
Ultimately that’s all this discussion can be. If you assert that there’s some sort of standard of “reading comprehension” and that some people lack this intelligence, you’re already starting a conversation that puts you above them. You float right on by the central struggle of human conversation - being understood - and just pick your favorite winners and losers.
Yes, every time someone disagrees with me they are clearly demonstrating how bad reading comprehension has become in the modern day. It’s so hard being as smart and correct all the time as I am.
I have felt this way for a few years now. It doesn’t help that many of the family and friends closest to me are getting older. They definitely can’t read as well as they used to. I have to make sure to word my posts on Facebook and Instagram very carefully and with concise, efficient diction. Any sarcasm or meaning left implied just flies over their heads. It scares me regarding when I get to their age.
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…
I think that more or less relates to FOMO (fear of missing out). Some really scare to slowly digest something because he thinks he would miss the vast information out there that keeps churning indefinitely.
Check out the podcast “Sold a Story”, it is made by American Public Media and explains, or at least tries to answers why functional and general illiteracy are so high in the US.
That site is showing literacy improvement for 4th graders since 2003. It also says “21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate in 2022.” but then another graph showing “United States 86.0 %” in global ranking of literacy. It’s just a hodgepodge of stats being semi-sourced with little to no conext, it even includes Wikipedia as a source.
I’m not saying there’s no literacy problems in the US, I just don’t know what to make of that site specifically.
There’s a bunch of other studies out there that back that number…It’s always generally 20% can’t read at all…50% can’t do critical analysis of text.
It’s really ugly…Those people all vote, and I think it helps explain how the most vile ridiculous demons the R’s put out there get 30%+ of the vote. It’s extremely hard to refute lies when the person consuming and believing the lie can’t read.
It’s only going to get worse. 20% of the US is illiterate. 50% can’t read above a 6th grade level.
I believe it.
When I watch TikTok, the video will explain everything extremely clearly, and the comments are FILLED with questions or criticism that were answered or done in the video.
My favourite is when I comment on a Canadian TikTok page about something, and someone else comments “ughhh it’s not illegal here and it’s $5” and I reply with “what province?” and they respond “Texas”. Like bitch, you’re on a CANADIAN page, with the person clearly talking about CANADA, and you’re talking about something unrelated in Texas telling me that I am wrong?
Don’t forget that we recently had a pandemic with a virus that is known to cause permanent brain damage. This includes reduced motor function, mental capacity and personality changes.
That’s okay. That just means the people who understand science and respect others by wearing masks will be on top in the future. Actually a pretty calming thought.
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.
On your latter point, I have taken to calling this “The Death of Expertise”. Not only has the state of being an intellectual been diminished to, at best, a hobby, but much of the population legitimately abhors it. This might be something of a narrow view based on my US nationality, but I have been attacked so many times for using “big words to pretend to be better than I am” that I struggle to see it any other way. I have north of a 100k-word vocabulary if you include jargon and other specialization-specific words.
But beyond that, and even worse, in my opinion, is the inherent and immediate distrust I see in experts. People who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of singular branches of knowledge or tasks are summarily dismissed for the very act that makes them the people to listen to. For a personal example, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, making me an expert in VFX and the computational and mathematics principles behind it, when the on-set shooting occurred a couple of years ago with Alec Baldwin, some guy on Facebook suggested in a friend’s post that all gunshots in movies should be CGI. I responded with my credentials and laid out not only that it was impossible, but also why in as lay terms as I could. He decided to argue with me that he was right and I should shut up, so I laid down a full mathematical analysis of the best-case scenario of implementing his change, with supporting evidence from industry standards groups, which showed that doing so would mean that every single VFX artist in the world would do nothing but put muzzle flashes on guns and it would leave about 3 man-months worth of time to finish every single other VFX shot for every other movie, TV-show, commercial, and music video. He still told me I was wrong. Toss on all of the 2020 right-wing nut jobs who emphatically believed Anthony Faucci was wrong and stupid when he is literally one of the world’s foremost experts I epidemiology and virology, and so many more examples… People just don’t know when to sit down and shut the fuck up because they are amongst their betters in some specific topic.
Sudden? No. Been dropping off since Reagan started the anti-education push his masters wanted? Yes. The illiteracy and lack of critical thinking skills have (intentionally) been instilled, or removed depending on your viewpoint, from the educational process worldwide. And as usual… the ‘wealthy’ “have a plan”.
One of my tasks at work is creating content - blogs, social media posts, internal communication emails, etc. We are instructed to write everything at a 5th-grade level because that’s where the average American reads. Not the lowest-level American, the average.
I also get to do customer support for people who would not have to contact me if they had actually read the information I wrote for them.
I’m a nurse and we were taught to educate patients at the fifth grade level as well. Believe it or not, the sex ed level is even lower! The average American seems to struggle with such topics as “it’s bad to touch or be touched when the person being touched doesn’t like it” and “don’t put random household objects in your butthole.”
I don’t know if it’s at a 5th grade level, but the XKCD comic has an editor that flags words that are not in the top 500 most used words. The author used it in a few comics to explain complicated things in “plain English”.
You’re on Internet. Many people are not native English speaker.
Secondly, people are saying this kind of shit litteraly since anciant Greece. You’re late to the party. They complained about it in each and every place of the western world at every time we have written records to read that shit. It’s seriously amazing how this trope is one of the most consistent of the history of mankind. And it doesn’t depend on the language obviously.
Iirc, even the Greeks bemoaned the written word because it harmed physical memory and made out brains weak because we could just consult tablets lazily instead of memorizing everything.
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