No Stupid Questions

You are going crazy. I've been on the internet since like 1992 and have spent many, many years reading forums and playing text-based role playing games, and this is very not new. Spelling has always been awful because the internet isn't a formal medium where that stuff matters to most people. If anything it's probably gotten better since the advent of smart phones with built in auto-correct.

No, I think you does have point, I've been sawing that, too.

Don't forget the internet is global. People for whom English is a second language are much more common than they once were.

My spelling and grammar are a lot worse when I type on my phone. I also accidentally a word.

I don't bother with correcting it since I don't care.

My mobile spelling has gotten to be garbage because my phone keyboard autocorrects Sometimes and I've gotten lazy about Swype/deleting mid-word mistakes. My pen/paper and also physical keyboard spelling remains persnickety

I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught "whole word reading" rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as "whole words" and eventually be able to read.

So, they can't actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.

When you can't read it's not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don't really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.

Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.

Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.

It's not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.

I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?

It's not just spelling, even online people don't even bother using grammar. They literally stuff 4 different sentences in one line without using commas or periods. It's maddening, honestly.

It’s been awful for a while.

All the too/to/two or their/they’re/there kind of wreckage along with stuff like “for all intensive purposes”, “flee market”, or “diffuse the situation”.

There’s tons of writing like that everywhere. Wouldn’t be so bad if people learned when corrected, but I think most can’t be bothered.

My take is that people don’t read anymore along with probably an unhealthy dose of laziness and “gotta write all messed up to act cool” to boot.

Reading well-written books of any sort will help the mind fix how words go together and how they’re spelled. But today everyone reads everyone else’s shitty grammar, spelling, and whatever massacre of stylistic choices were made to stand out and look cool in the comment section of the youtube videos or tiktoks they just watched. That’s probably the extent of the reading they do.

I blame these f'ing phone keyboards and autocorrect. I can't see what I am touching, I can't feel it, there's no feedback, and I have to look up while I type. Whoever came up with approach deserves... A bad case of indigestion.

Lemmy seems to have a pretty high number of non-native English speakers, particularly Germans and other Europeans. I think this leads to people making seemingly simple grammar mistakes while also appearing to know English well.

Plus, American schools have completely gone to shit, so I’m sure that doesn’t help either.

I've noticed mine got worse for some reason in the last five years. So many words that I've had no issue spelling I've lost confidence in spelling and need to look it up. Happened around COVID for me, not sure why.

Increased reliance on touch screen devices with dodgy autocorrect probably accounts for a good chunk of it.

I know it is not uncommon for me to have to go back and edit something I wrote from my phone after I submit it because I didn't see the autocorrect mistake before hitting send.

I would not be surprised if autocorrect was a major culprit along with phone keyboards. You can type something correctly and have autocorrect make it wrong. It's also super easy to get the wrong letter if you have normal sized hands and are typing on a phone keyboard. I have turned autocorrect completely off and am significantly less error prone as a result.

I frequently decide against correcting an error if I think my intention is clear, and I am in a hurry. I don't really care what strangers on the internet think of my editing skills.

Ayi wudnt sei its oful, jast difarent

I no phone gudz mane.

No, but really typing on a glass slab sucks. The software sucks ass too and seemingly no OEM is interested in improving it or trying something new.
Android's spellchecker sucks at handling 2 languages at once so I gotta turn it off and rely on the keyboard's auto correct.
Both FUTO and Heliboard insist on not correcting obvious misspellings or change correct words to nonexistent ones.

I'm convinced we've gotten the maximum we can out of the touchscreen QWERTY format. EIther we get a new Blackberry KeyOne style device or we get some stenography-like software innovation that converts vibes to words, I dunno.

wu7 u m34n, m8? 4lw4y5 b33n l1k3 d15. /s

I think that it's mostly just Lemmy being less dominated by native English speakers. Many of those mistakes that seem baffling "make sense" in some other languages

I'm burnt out man. I just dont have the energy or the careth to be accurate or even care about a small thing.

You're not crazy. Nobody wants their grammar correcting; they lash out and call people who do that "grammar nazis" instead of thanking them for helping them improve. So they get to post whatever they like, and of course as more people see stuff spelt incorrectly they assume that's correct and use those errors themselves, but intentionally. And of course the dictionary writers realise they are descriptive, not proscriptive, so the argument "the dictionary says..." is voided.

Autocorrect is OK to an extent but it's not smart enough yet to understand what people are actually saying. So it gets switched off.

Also it is worth mentioning that English is a complex language with many inconsistencies. "extream" is incorrect, but "stream" isn't, and that "eam/eme" is pronounced the same way. So "extream" is at least understandable. It's similar to "ect" instead of "etc", which is commonly mispronounced as "ek-setera" so you can see why people think the C is after the E.

I used to try to help people a lot but just got a whole load of abuse back. These days I only query something if I genuinely can't grok what they're trying to say. Or I just ignore it. If the question is so badly garbled that I can't understand it I just assume they won't be able to understand may answer, which will probably be quite detailed.

Worse: it's common for the younger generation to reduce everything to three-letter, monosyllabic slang. "Mid" "on god" "no cap" there's an intellectual laziness that's trendy and it's getting worse with time.

Most of the people you interact with online aren't native English speakers.

My older friend and i were talking about this a about 6 months ago. We both are convinced auto correct functions are getting worse. I suspect AI injection into the function somehow, but tin foil hat me also thinks it's strategy to force more people to use microphone. Seems way more valuable to data miners

It also seems to be on the rise in online publications. Both spelling errors and synonym/grammar issues have increased significantly over the last year, most significantly in the last 3-4 months.

Completely agree. I cringe on a regular basis. I never know if it’s “stylistic”, typos, laziness? Sentence structure has also gone for shit.

I make more spelling mistakes when autocorrect is on than when it's off (and every little update to the os seems to re-enable it 😬) because it constantly wants to change words that were spelled correctly, to a different word that doesn't fit the context.

A majority have always been bad at spelling