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.
But no I’m just an asshole who’s never wrong.
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.