Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?

ThatWeirdGuy1001@sh.itjust.works to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 721 points –

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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  1. English not the first language for about 7.5 billion people on this planet.
  2. More people with English as a second or even third language have a higher reading and comprehension level than the average USAian
  3. 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/

54% of US adults only have a sixth grade competency level in reading. 21% of US adults are functionally illiterate.

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.

To be fair, sarcasm specifically can be VERY hard to convey via text or even voice, which is where a majority of communication happens nowadays.