Asklemmy

43889 readers

2809 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

557

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

378 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a difference between simplifying a message and writing at a lower reading comprehension level. I think a lot of accidental incomprehension might just be caused by the reader not being very good at reading English.

In my country (and I think the whole EU), government agencies have to write at a B1 level to make sure official publications and letters are accessible to all citizens. I think that's a good rule of thumb for online conversations as well. (However, writing pleasant prose at B1 level is a whole different beast. Generally, they're not very good at it.)

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good point on catering to those who speak other languages, I hadn't considered that.

So what does a B1 level equate to? I'm assuming it's lower than college level, probably lower that a high school level? Are we talking like middle school, grade school, or something else?

[–] maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry, didn't get a notification.

Yeah, it's basically at high school level, so most of the adult population should be able to understand it without much issue.