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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I've only noticed a trend of people not being able to answer more than one question at a time, even when chatting and they have all week to answer. The first question is somehow always skipped.

This is making me mad, as I feel forced to pause my thoughts. Pause the ideas in my head. Wait for the reply, reply myself, wait for the conversation to turn a bit and finally be able to ask the second question. Now if I have three questions, I might as well give up and talk to a chatbot.

People have the attention span of a peanut by now.

Oh boy. Absolutely.

Even if I bullet point or number my questions, only about half of them gets answered. Like...what is your fucking problem?

Have you tried explicitly asking the person to reply to all points and use a similar format eg

Please respond in kind like so.

  1. Answer to question one
  2. Answer to question two
  3. Answer to question three

It's important to answer all questions. Partial responses waste both of our time.

You can also send out forms that literally wont validate unless completely filled out.

In a professional setting, this drives me nuts. If I ask three questions, I need the answer to all three questions before I can do the thing you want me to do.

Online? Meh, normally there's a specific part of someone's comment that I'm interested in and that's what I engage with. If they want to talk about more, or talk about something else, I generally don't care and will discontinue engaging.

Yeah I don't get this either, it's been like this for at least a few years.

Ha, come to think of it, I remember a teacher complaining about it on tests back in 2007. "Slow down and answer the entire question"