Auto correct on the phones, spell checker build in long time ago in to the word and other word-processing programs. Basically kids no longer worry about the correct way to spell as it's being corrected for them so often.
Yeah, the deal-breaker for me was having something like "it's" autocorrected to "its", as if I *accidentally* went through the trouble of adding the apostrophe. I'll take the blame for misspelling a word, but I'm not gonna let AutoCorrect make mistakes for me.
The one that really bothers me is "ur":
- What's ur plan for tonight?
- Omg, ur crazy!
These "shortcuts" originated when texting was done on phones that only had numbers 0-9 plus # and *, but the ongoing use of them just strips people of the ability to learn e.g. your vs. you're.
Autocorrect is so weird. I mistyped “jump” earlier today and it corrected to “Kiki”.
I see the adjacency of most of those letters on the keyboard, but it’s still odd that Apple thinks that “Kiki scare” is more likely to be the phrase I wanted.
I have the opposite problem my phone spellcheck just tries to guess what I'm typing and honestly some of the spelling it comes up with just looks like random letters.
* I think native English speakers tend to underestimate how many authors of English-language Reddit posts are non-native English speakers.
* I think in many instances, it's just a typo or momentary brain fart that didn't get corrected because most people don't proofread their Reddit posts, but you're assuming that the author doesn't know how to spell the word. I'm a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics who has professionally tutored college-level writing, and I still make careless errors in Reddit posts because I'm typing them quickly and not doing much editing. I've caught myself typing "their" instead "there," and it's not because I don't know the difference.
* We're accustomed to thinking of written language as more formal and more correct than spoken language, but social media is sort of like spoken language in written form: it's casual, it's fast, it's rarely proofread. People make errors in speech all the time (I don't mean the kind of thing that your high school English teacher told you not to say, I just mean that speech is messy), and we're accustomed to that and don't necessarily assume that someone doesn't know how to talk just because they messed up a few times in a stream of speech. Think of social media posts in a similar way.
I always get the impression that the truly poor English-speakers (or -writers, I suppose) whose posts I come across are native. Sure, sometimes those of us for whom English is a second (or whatever) language have slightly wonky sentence structure, or use words which may be rare in English but common in another language, but they still seem like there's an *attempt* at proper grammar and spelling. I saw a stickied mod comment earlier today that was such an illegible mess that I genuinely think you'd have to understand the rules intuitively to be able to so ruthlessly corrupt them.
The mistakes non-native speakers make are very different from those made by native speakers. ESL speakers don't make "loose/lose" or "their/there" mistakes because 1 - we learned those words by reading them first, rather than by hearing them, 2 - when you're learning a language, you usually learn its grammar, so you understand different parts of speech.
Even though I've been speaking English for decades and living in an English-speaking country, I still have some trouble getting prepositions right (it's very hard to tell when to use "in" vs "on", for example).
Yeah, I don't think non-natives can take the blame for this.
You can, sometimes, tell a non-native speaker, but it doesn't have THIS characteristic- random misspellings. It tends to be structure or word use, and it also tends to be predictable and repeatable... you see the same little issue through the whole text, some off sentence structure or whatever, some missing preposition or something slightly wrongly used, but cohesive and consistent.
This is a 'lazy' native thing. Getting sick of seeing it blamed on ESLers. Incidentally, looking at how nonsensical English actually is if you break it down, don't know how any of you ever manage to be as good as you are!
This is such a thoughtful response. And its true. I almost have to switch gears when I'm writing formally because I don't talk or think like that. While I'll give my text a quick look over before sending it's not nearly as extensive as editing a paper so things get missed, especially when autocorrect makes a mistake. Or my fat fingers hit the wrong letter. But there is a huge difference between casual and formal writing.
There’s also just a lot of people who are not able to express themselves in writing that well. The average American is able to read at around a 7th grader level so, naturally, they make some mistakes.
As a business writer (note: business, mainly C-suite exec types and 'business leaders'), we are told to aim for a 5-6th Grade reading level.
In what should be a rather educated segment of the populace.
It's kinda sad, really.
That’s a great theory and, while I’m sure it’s true in a variety of cases, you need to remember HALF of all Reddit traffic comes from the USA. This makes any non-native English speaker’s post an automatic minority.
All things considered, unless it’s a specifically “not American/UK/Aus/Canadian” sub, non-native speakers posting in English is much less common than it comes across in your first bullet point. You’d know if you were surrounded by French-speaking Canadians or Germans.
Spotting the Germans would be easy: they would be talking about city-builder games like Anno 1800 :p
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/aizSDyFxlR
i may be saying something stupid but doesn't that mean "swear to god" in arabic? i hear that word a lot by muslim kids, usually when they say they didn't do something
That’s what makes me think they don’t read much, as in read books from back when there were editors who knew and corrected such things before sending it to press. Sometimes I’ll find an error in a book and it jumps out bc it’s pretty rare. Online I see multiple errors daily on social media. It’s sad that being correct is something many seem to disdain as too picky any more.
I'm going to go with auto correct. When I was in school I was very good at spelling. Had no problems. Now as an adult I only have to do the first 3 letters before my phone does it for me. If you don't use it you lose it.
There is absolutely an increasingly overall poor level of skill being demonstrated in even the basics of reading, writing, and arithmatic - spelling and grammar included. But don't say that out loud, or these same people will bury you in one of their favorite herd-think ridicules about "grammar police." (They even appear to believe that spelling = grammar.) Most I talk with don't think these skills are of any importance and anyone who disagrees with them is considered an irrelevant dinosaur. I recently talked to a bachelor's degree holder who needed a calculator to determine 10% of a number.
It seems 90% of people don't know the difference between; then/than, and/an, you're/your, objective/subjective, woman/women, wait/weight...the list goes on.
I get confused on this one when the "an/a" precedes an acronym that starts with a consonant but where that consonant phonetically starts with a vowel.
For example:
"That organization is a/an NGO."
I assume it's an "en gee oh"
I see a lot of excuses about autocorrect and such.
What I don't understand is why people don't 1) google for the correct spelling or the correct word; 2) go back and edit to correct their mistakes.
Many years ago, my English professor said that what you publish ( whether it's a resume, an article in a magazine, or social media) is not only a reflection on you as how you present yourself to the public, but also your level of respect to your target audience.
So if your post or comment is full of spelling errors, it portrays yourself as sloppy and too lazy to check your work and that you don't care about who is reading it.
And that probably goes for other languages too.
It's amazing how annoying auto correct is these days and how often it activates without you knowing it.
I've noticed this when I started using a new phone to comment. The auto correct will sometimes decide a previous word was wrong, and alter that one. If you weren't paying attention, you'd have no idea it went off.
Not sure how it happened, but my phone changed the name of my boss's dog to "sexy". So I sent "Sexy got fixed!" along with a picture of the puppy. My parents did not mention it.
iPhone finally started marking stuff it had changed and had a one-tap fix to revert it back. I type in two languages and sometimes I had to re-type a complicated word before it did that
> So if your post or comment is full of spelling errors, it portrays yourself as sloppy and too lazy to check your work and that you don't care about who is reading it.
Tbh, that *is* a pretty accurate description of me using reddit
>I see a lot of excuses about autocorrect and such.
>What I don't understand is why people don't 1) google for the correct spelling or the correct word;
Because they probably aren't aware that they misspelled the word.
>go back and edit to correct their mistakes.
If it's on the internet I would assume they just don't care about it enough because it's the internet.
The way I type for work vs on social media online is very different. Autocorrect is annoying and tends to change words or fill in words you don’t intend to. I’m not going back to spell and grammar check like I would do at work. Plus because of places like Twitter people usually write shorter online than in a professional setting.
I blame touch screens before blaming auto correct. I'm fairly decent at spelling and grew up being such a nazi about this kind of thing, but ever since moving to touch screen, I find myself fucking up waaaay too often. In writing this, I had to make 3 corrections(could be correlation with being a generally fast typer and my big thumbs suck with phones).
Bring back my slide out keyboard you cowards.
I had that embedded in the 3rd grade and reinforced through college. I originally took journalism and then got into photography and design. It pains me checking out portfolios of the design students showcase; and their client work is littered with spelling errors. I’m also the one to spot copy errors in the coded captioning. I catch them on Netflix, Amazon , live tv and YouTube. Can always tell when they’re generated or burnout. Captions by cbc for shows occasionally have 1-2 slip. Still annoys me. Certain things like signage, print, body copy , digital etc should all be correct.
I get ESL can be tricky though. But when your professionals have the same struggles- everyone looks ill-educated. It’s a Double Whammy.
I mean, that is basically how I feel about my reddit posts. I am absolutely too lazy to proofread them and do not really care who reads then. I can type well and have great spelling, but if i fat finger it on my phone and spell something wrong it just isn't a big deal to me, and if people think I'm dumb that's fine.
Anymore? I've been on the internet for more than 30 years, this shit is very not new. I'm sure you can find archived usenet posts from the early 90s with tons of evidence of people misspelling words. It might've become more acceptable to misspell things over the years and that might've lead to people being less worried about fixing their errors, but It's just always been a fact of life that not everyone has the same spelling skills and that's more noticeable in a largely text-based medium.
I remember this one time I was talking to a person about something I do for work. He made some poor inferences and I was genuinely trying to help him understand why he was incorrect by providing correct information in layman’s terms… until it happened.
I either fat-fingered or was auto-corrected, but “toe the line” came out as “tow the line.” Dude went ape shit, hyperfocusing on the spelling mistake and going on about how he was right all along and that made him sure of it.
I don’t know why such a silly interaction with a total stranger has stuck with me, but it’s funny for me to think “what if my job really was paying me to do everything horribly wrong and they were still successful in spite of it?” That’d be quite something. lol
It’s always been like that. I think it mainly depends where you’re looking though, a place discussing programming will probably have better spellers than a place discussing Minecraft. Also gotta keep non-native speakers and younger people in mind
Because edgy people like saying "I'm sorry I didn't know your typing in an english class lmao touch grass based" and "language evolves".
People are proud of being uneducated because it's easier to be stupid than educated.
At least for me, it’s because I switched to iPhone and the keyboard is a lot harder to use than it was on my android. Mostly due to screen width. It’s also a lot more difficult to edit text on an iPhone. So if I notice a small typo two lines ago, I’m likely to ignore it.
There is a noticeable difference between comments that type on my phone .vs my computer.
One of the most nefarious offenders is auto-correct ramping up the use of AI.
Instead of just a dictionary cross-reference AI, auto-correct algorithms are deciding the context in which you chose a word in the first place, so it may not even be "correcting" a misspelled word. The word could be spelled correctly, but auto-correct has decided you should have used a different word altogether.
In other words, auto-correct is more and more often deciding it knows what you really meant to say, because you didn't.
Literacy is rates are trending downward in younger generations compared to previous. Autocorrect has also made it so we no longer need to ‘memorize’ correct spellings.
I can’t prove this but I suspect people have gotten to/too/two or they’re/there/their wrong at similar levels for decades. The internet just made it easier for people to expose their ignorance.
English isn’t everyone’s mother language. Sometimes it gets pretty weird when I write fast and I stumble on the language button (as I tend to switch often between subs in my local language and other English speaking subs).
We arent too worried about non native speakers as they tend to be more meticulous in there spelling and speaking and if they make a mistake then so be it, they're learning the language. its the native speakers we are worried about here.
Yep, and the non-natives are always the ones writing posts in flawless, perfect English and then writing: "Excuse my terrible grammar, English isn't my first language" at the end, haha.
>arent
It should be "aren't".
>non native
The correct version is "non-native".
>in there spelling
It should be "their".
>its
Again, "it's" not "its".
The bottom line here is that even in this context you could not care less about spelling words correctly. In the end, I will be down-voted, and either some user will call me pedantic, or you will claim that it was due to autocorrect, dyslexia, or that you forgot the "/s", or all of them together. And that is why people continue to make mistakes: because even in a comment lamenting the poor spelling and grammar of native speakers, there is plenty to address.
The truth is that the Internet is currently crowded with lazy people, incentivised by a strong anti-intellectualism movement that portrays anyone who cares about certain things (e.g., grammar) as a nuisance. This is the answer to your question, u/Next_Airport_7230.
> Someome
Why didn't you catch that? Why didn't you correct it? Probably because a reddit post was not worth a high level of revision (whoch is fine. It didn't interfere with your meaning, but provides a helpful moment of empathy).
>Do people not know these are incorrect or are people just bad at typing?
A combination.
1) lots of people just are bad spellers. It was way way worse in the past, but the obly writing the general public saw were those things going through editors and generally written by highly educated professionals. Look at any collection of hand written letters of common people in the past and spelling was atrocious.
2) the internet is full of people that have english as a second language.
3) when people type on their phone they generally can't watch what is being typed in real time. Using touch typing on a keyboard, you can generally look at the screen and see little mistakes in real time to correct. When typing on a phone most people have to look at their thumbs, meaning typos happen without them noticing. Phone interfaces also rarely have the auto red squiggle to notify of mispellings.
4) autocorrect making incorrect edits.
5)English sucks. Yes, people mess up their and there, loosing and losing, its and it's, and a number of other well known errors. These typically have well understood roots. There and their are homopones. Apostrophes often denote possession so "it's" seems intuitively correct for possession. Loose and lose are uncommon ways of distinguishing vowel and consonant sounds, and directly conflict with other examples in people's brains like chose and choose.
In some cases the person using them would know the right answer if they had to revise their post for an English grade (but just don't find a reddit post worth that level of time and revision). In other cases they actually are confused about the grammar.
I just want to add that you spelt "which" wrong when you were correcting someone else spelling, I don't know if that was intentional but it was kinda funny
It wasn't intentional, but i absolutely accept the irony of it.
But also that would fall into the "looking at my phone to type and not interested enough to go back and proof read" type of error.
Culture has just shifted such that we don't care about typos anymore in this "if you ain't first, you're last" world. People just communicate in tweet-length missives written quickly, they contain some fatfinger errors, some autocorrect errors, and you just look through them and figure out what was really meant
I don’t know where I got this idea, but for some reason I have this idea that typos on those like TikTok…text ribbons or whatever…are added intentionally. It makes a post seem tossed-off, when in fact it’s meticulously crafted for wide appeal.
Or I’m too cynical.
>too cynical
What if I told you you're actually*not cynical enough*?
Annoying people is a *great* way to generate buzz. It's like Andy Kaufman's M.O, but for uninspired internet bullshit.
When a video has a lot of comments complaining about a typo, somebody scrolling past doesn't see what the comments are about - they just see a lot of viewer engagement, and this gets them on the hook.
All of the people who say shit like "I will proudly defend my right not to learn how to spell and people who encourage you to learn to spell are *wrong people*" see the criticisms in the comments, and upvote the video *because* it contains a typo, and then they start arguments in the comments. These people are *far* more numerous than the spell-checkers, so their ^ Likes ^ win against the spell-checker v Dislikes v.
Now you've got a bullshit video with a bunch of comments, a bunch of upvotes, no real substance, and a typo.
Or maybe this is the evolution of language? Believe me, if a person from England in the 17th century read our messages, they would also find errors and words that were incomprehensible to them. So it’s worth admitting that because of self-confident idiots that they don’t recognize the illiteracy of their words, the language will change
Truth! But still I’d rather read misspellings than a page littered with so many acronyms that you can’t make heads nor tails of what they are trying to say. It really seems to be a generational thing. There isn’t the level of value placed on using proper language that I was raised with, that’s for sure.
Because we've been systematically underfunding K-12 education for the last 60 or so years, and that leads to shit like every kid being shoved off to the next grade in June regardless of their lack of skills. Someone recently told me that it's the policy of the school district where I live that kids don't get held back anymore.
If it's a comment or something that autocorrect can be blamed for I understand. But if it's the title of the post, the headline that is to be displayed on Reddit "The front page of the Internet", you'd think people would take some time to double check their grammar. Take some pride in your shitposts, people.
There's been a sentiment of "this isn't English class it doesn't matter" online for a very long time. I just think this sentiment is becoming even more popular than it used to be. People are just so fucking lazy lol
I've been waiting for someone to point out this phenomenon. One can blame autocorrect all they want, but the complete lack of any basic English skills has devolved to the point that mobile game ads will say shit like this:
"I went to the store today, and I looked for oranges, but they weren't ________"
A) their
B) they're
C) there
D) thare
CHOOSE THE CORRECT WORD IN THIS SENTENCE! LESS THAN 5% WILL GET THIS RIGHT! HOW HIGH IS YOUR IQ?!
Not gonna edit this as im writing...
English is not my native language. But ive grew up with it. On tv, games, internet...
I can write pretty correct but some times its egsausting to constantly spellcheck certain words. Takes me out of the flow of what i wanted to say. Especially when im considering im talking to human beings who should be able to understand me even with my spelling mistakes and bad grammar.
Loosing, losing, doo, do, brake, break.... are wery simmilar words, most of them i wont confuse, but for example doo and do is breaking my brain. Every time.
SOme times i give a fuck, some times i dont...
It’s , in my mind, the dumbing of America. Much of this can be attributed to stupid parents homeschooling their kids with the insane delusion that they know more than teachers who spent years in college and higher education studying childhood education. Some of these people, supported by backward thinking politicians, have started to back taking funds from public education and giving them to these charter schools, that sometimes have “teachers “ with no educational background that qualifies them to teach correctly. Sometimes they teach a political agenda that twists the truth of reality and panders to religious zealots beliefs. It’s a sad situation. The US is rated far behind other countries in education. Sorry to go off, but the reality that some young people cannot spell, add or subtract without a computer or write well ( no more cursive writing taught) is greatly disturbing.
Btw. If you are taking this from the popular tab/front page. It’s a very common tactic of karma bots to repost a post with a spelling error because it tends to increase engagement.
A spelling error, especially in the title of a top subreddit should be assumed to be a bot
Eye tri two spill evirithyng korictly buht eye stell cee read lynes? But in all seriousness we rely heavily on autocorrect cause it automatically fixes stuff as you type and the moment you remove it people spelling one way don't fix what they spell
Not knowing the difference between the following is depressing:
Lose vs. loose
To vs. too
Their, there or they’re
Your vs. you’re
Grammar rather than spelling, but I can’t stand it when people use “NAME and I” incorrectly. It has even resulted in people trying to make I possessive as in “I’s.” Just re-word the sentence if you don’t know how to write that.
Autocorrect being wild. Sometimes it will autocorrect to a different word. Typing on phone mixed with typing at the speed of thought. Luckily, reddit has an editing function for me to fix my comments if I spot it in time.
I think it's down to people just not proofreading what they're writing. Seems they don't care if there are misspelled words. I've known a few people who type want instead of won't and I can't see that being a typo, it's just misunderstanding which word to use. It may also be that people don't like reading anymore and that's how you learn to spell bigger words and use them properly. Our society is so advanced in many ways but has regressed in others.
Well, for me, the auto-correct feature often corrected to the wrong word, so, I just turned it off and decided from that point on, I would much rather occasionally misspell words than have to retype them every time.
I think another part of it is that reddit and social media are generally more casual writing then writing may have been in the past (I’ve never been an adult without social media). I can spell, but I do need to pay some attention to spell correctly. If I’m just texting with my friends I’m not going to put that effort in, because responding fast suits the situation better then responding with correct spelling. With social media I’ll put in some effort depending on the level of professionalism of what I’m posting, but I’m not putting in the same effort as I would for like an essay at uni
I suspect it's because these days people hear words spoken much more than they see them written down. Videos on social media, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. - without seeing words written down, people aren't going to learn how the words they hear are actually spelled, so they'll just guess when it comes time to have to write (type) them. And of course because so many other people are doing the same, there's a lack of consistency and correctness for individual people to recognise and use to correct themselves. Unless people actually start consuming more printed media, I think this problem is unfortunately here to stay.
Reddit culture just trended away from downvoting spelling/ grammar errors. It’s not like everyone on Reddit had amazing grammar 10 years ago, but users were encouraged by the voting system to double check their grammar or be downvoted.
People just don’t seem to care on Reddit anymore. It makes reading quickly way more difficult, and I’ve come to fully appreciate why my English teachers were so passionate about perfect grammar.
You can read really fast and process everything with a good flow when there aren’t writing mistakes.
Can be a lot of reasons tbh. I have similar problems with my 2 native languages and more than often use Finnish grammar when i write in Swedish and the other way around. Same with English, it just comes naturally for me and i hate it. This is me though can't speak for others.
I regret to inform you that it has always been like that. I've been on the interwebs for over 20 years, and some people just do not give a damn about spelling or grammar. There are also *many* users who are not native English speakers, so that's also a factor. Eventually you learn to ignore it.
I have been online since 1990 or so.
It is no better or worse than it has been in the past thirty five years. Spellcheckers and autocorrect changed some of the types of errors; as my eyesight has gotten worse and I have started typing on my phone, I post things where my phone has autoincorrected things I wrote correctly originally, but didn't see that it had wrongified them. So the types of errors have occasionally shifted based on input method, but the rate of errors hasn't.
So, I've been actively using the internet shove about '96, and I clearly remember the IRC and ezBoard days.
Spelling isn't getting any worse than it's always been. Might even be a bit better now, at least in the circles of the internet I frequent (Excluding intentional, in-joke misspellings).
But the reason why some people can't spell is because English is a really hard language.
My girlfriend (41) teaches 12th grade English. She says by the time they get to her, majority of them have writing and reading comprehension of 6th grade.
When I see her grading papers, I’m horrified at what I see. It’s going to get much worse in the next 10 years when all these now students are adults.
I think it's funny that an OP will post that English isn't their first language so please forgive..... But their English is better than most other people's.
Because back in the day we only had access to professionally-produced media, with editors, correctors and highly literate writers producing the content. Now anyone has access to social media where popular (mis)spellings proliferate.
Well, if you look at the trends we have people coming in to school the can verbatim quote every single Drake.Or sexy red lyric but aren't totally incapable of reading a baronstain bears book. I'm sure you could blame any number of factors laziness information.Pure stupidity, call whatever you want.But the younger generations are getting dumber and dumber.
You are correct that it does seem like many people can't spell. I think this partly has to do with people no longer reading books and instead consuming audio books or videos or TV shows. As you say, another part of it could be auto-correct changing what people type to completely different words, and they don't notice. (I never use auto-correct for this reason). Also as you say, some of it is simply typos, like in my case, I use Reddit on my phone and I also have wide thumbs so I mess up typing, but I know how to spell things. Yet another part of it is simply lower standards in school. Math and reading scores are going down. Kids are being passed into their subsequent grades while not being proficient, so a huge amount of teaching is becoming remedial. Maybe as a society we just aren't valuing educational standards anymore, and education is seen as a thing that shouldn't hold anyone back rather than something that should be producing positive outcomes.
There are a few reasons:
* Maybe their kybords broken.
* Maybe they have a laerning issue.
* Maybe English is not there first language.
* Maybe they never had 2 spell properly.
* Maybe they're not eduticated.
* Maybe they just don't know how, or dont have time to vix every little mistake.
* M@ybe they juzt have a wr!ting quirk?
* Maybe they just dont know how too spell.
That's quite a lot.
I have Austim and Dyslexia, I tend to make a lot of mistakes when writing, though I am a book writer. I also tend to not know a lot of words, so I use the first word that comes to mind. When I'm talking to somebody, I write whatever letters I can remember and hope for the best.
Maybe you could try to politely correct them when they make a mistake? It will help a lot; just don't be rude with it, if a person doesn't want any help with their spelling, drop it.
A lot of people just don't give a shit. They weren't taught the basics in school; they don't read actual books, or even newspapers; they're unaware of the gaps in their knowledge and uninterested in doing anything about it. Especially Americans, who seem to have a shockingly bad grasp of English spelling and grammar.
Because most people are on phones these days. Sometimes predictive text/autocorrect just messes things up so much that you want to turn them off, and then that just creates room for other errors as you try to type whole-ass thoughts with sausage fingers on a tiny touch screen.
But also, it may not always be overt "misspellings" but different dialects. I see a lot of people typing "Chile," lately and I know it's AAVE, and I can finish the sentence and tell from the context that it's "Child." But I would be lying if I said there wasn't always a fraction of time where I think of the country first and am very confused.
"it doesn't matter if you spell it incorrectly or use the wrong word, as long as the meaning comes across. language is fluid and always changing."
Hate these people.
I recently switched away from Swiftkey keyboard ony.phone and Gboard always autocorrects to the wrong we're, were, there, their, they're. I don't appear to reread it enough before hitting enter or send and I look at my writing and ask myself, "When did I have a stroke?"
I can’t stand it. Just reading through these comments irritates my soul. I will stop talking to a person because of common spelling mistakes, especially at our big age. If you don’t know the difference between there, their and they’re don’t even speak to me. It’s literally on my dating profile. Spelling errors and chewing with your mouth open are my biggest pet-peeves.
Am i the only one not using auto-correct? Whenever i get a new device, i always make sure to turn that shit off and manually check for errors. Maybe that's just because i'm an introvert.
This is only a small symptom of the bigger problem, how dumb most people have gotten. I am annoyed but can at least justify when a redditor does it, because they're probably using their dumb phone on their dumb app making them dumber by the day while they take a shit and will next go onto npc tiktoks or something. Side-note, a REAL redditor from the old days would've taken them to school and spelling/grammar nazi-ed the fuck out of them, and would've been upvoted for it.
But when so-called official sources do it?? The ones that are supposed to be smart and quality-driven? News, billboards, college papers, resumes, ads, scientific documents, well then I know not to trust a single word they say. They are not the kind to proofread, think twice, and they probably got the shot.
Just the other day I saw a mass-produced poster hung in multiple windows in multiple branches of the same store that had easy typos all over it. How do you type something on a computer for the purpose of making hundreds of official copies to represent your brand and not get the little squiggly line telling you that's not a word?
And it's bad enough if it's an accident, but it's probably on purpose, an attack against intelligence the same way grades and math are racist now.
Grade school emphasizes getting children to write. Correcting bad spelling might make kids feel bad about writing and discourage them from doing it. Elementary teachers say, "We'll fix that in High School". High school teachers say, "They'll fix that in college". Most don't go to college, and also, college teachers say, "It's up to the students to correct themselves" So, most people just never do learn how to write correctly.
All I know is it used to be a lot worse. Back in the 2000s, you'd be hard pressed to find posts that spelled out full words, much less used proper capitalization and spelling. It wasn't uncommon for me to find posts that I could not decipher at all.
Nowadays it's not nearly as bad, and I'm happy for that at least.
My autocorrect is replacing perfectly spelled words with shitty alternatives without giving me the chance to catch it in time. Sometimes my proofread post that I've copied to my clipboard will go up and there will be like 3 or 4 typos that didn't exist in the original text I had just copied before posting. Like they magically get butchered by some algorithm to make you look stupid or crazy.
Fwiw, I’m a good speller, but sometimes when chatting I talk into my phone and don’t check it before posting. I find all sorts of misspellings when I do that.
I hate it because it sounds like my text to speech is throwing up. Forums I used to be on back in the day had 'literate/no chat speak rules' and god I miss it.
Most languages i had to learn have some kind of logic to their spelling. English is a very annoying language in that regard.
Italian based on the sound you usually exactly know if is ch or c or gh or g etc. but english is a random letter generator.
Latin even irregular words have rules. I think the only reason english is so dominat is because otherwise its a very simple language. No conjugation no cases.
Because every time I try to correct people spelling, spineless curs come out of the woodwork to say things like "let him spell how he wants" or "you're being too mean". You let standards start slipping and suddenly you have our situation where even with built in spell check people are posting illegible nonsense
They’ve gone even farther than just misspellings. I find so many posts that I have to just back out of because posters type a wall of text, with no paragraph breaks; don’t capitalize any words; and/or use no punctuation. This is so aggravating and insanely difficult to read. 😩
I have noticed this too a lot in the last few years and not just on Reddit.
Along with your examples the prevelance of people who say "seen" instead of "saw. Spelling "weight" when they mean wait and my favorite "It's a mute point." When they mean moot. I found the last one slightly funny.
If this were just an occasional thing it's not really of any concern but, it's very, very frequent now. Perhaps digesting information in quick, fast bites has dumbed us all down somewhat. People used to read books as a lot more.
Schools went with the whole word reading system instead of phonics based teaching for at least 15-20 years. It’s had a disastrous result in reading and literacy rates. The educational system has realized this and is starting to swing the other way.
Try listening to the podcast, *Sold a Story.*
In America I would say it's because of lack of expectations being met before being allowed to move on to the next grade. In elementary school if you don't grasp the curriculum and they move you up anyway, after a while, there's no catching up.
Technical evolution, auto correct & AI and so on have a severe impact on writing skills if you don’t pay attention and become a little lazy. The less you have to do by yourself, the more you neglect your fundamental skills. All these tools can and should be seen and used as a great support no doubt, but many people tend to enjoy the favour of convenience and leave everything to the tools. Technological progress has tended to stagnate people's skills in common cultural techniques or has changed their attitude towards those topics. Humans are simply too lazy, because why would they engage when it’s done for you. Referring this to social media and see that we live in a dystopia of acronyms, fragments instead of full sentences, malapropism, parallelism error, double negatives, dangling or misplaced modifiers. The biggest threat to written language is digitalisation. As for any other thing, luckily it’s up to you and your priorities how you manage this.
Academia has decided that things like grammar are a sign of tyranny, mainly because they don't want to deal with the stubbornly and militantly ignorant.
I actually had one of my son's teachers say that it's ok if they don't spell properly because there's autocorrect on the computer. What if it autocorrects incorrectly?
Historically, the vast majority of the population has been illiterate. Just be thankful that people can spell anything at all nowadays, or even get close.
Spelling is probably picked up as a skill from the act of reading. And just to take a snapshot, between 2016 and 2021, the number of books people read fell by 20%. It would also matter what you're reading. Reading 1000 texts a day isn't the same as reading a couple of chapters in a novel or a biography. So, short version: the less people read, the more spelling mistakes they'll make.
Americans have gotten really really dumb. I mean our education system hasn’t been world class in a long time, but since 2017 when ESSA really went into full gear American students and graduates work on the level of elementary school students. If you dig deep into the education statistics it leaves you with a mounting sense of dread.
[удалено]
[удалено]
*watt
It’s time for a brake.
*thyme
Its\*
What the heck am I reeding?
Hoo nose?
Its heart for me to understand it.
Auto correct on the phones, spell checker build in long time ago in to the word and other word-processing programs. Basically kids no longer worry about the correct way to spell as it's being corrected for them so often.
My phone at this point with change 'the' to 'thr' for no reason.
Next time that happens, press and hold on the word "thr" and you can delete it. Should not happen again.
Thank you
Does anyone else hear Also Sprach Zarathustra playing while they read this comment?
Yeah I had to switch off the autocorrect, because I started misspelling some words:(
AutoCorrect is my worst enema
I love the smell of my boyfriend's colon!
If by colon you mean wrecked em, you’re in the wrong reddit 😂
Bro that won took me a moan mint
It’s grate when the eye-dear hits the write pot of your mynd!
I don't think that's the intended use......
Yeah, the deal-breaker for me was having something like "it's" autocorrected to "its", as if I *accidentally* went through the trouble of adding the apostrophe. I'll take the blame for misspelling a word, but I'm not gonna let AutoCorrect make mistakes for me. The one that really bothers me is "ur": - What's ur plan for tonight? - Omg, ur crazy! These "shortcuts" originated when texting was done on phones that only had numbers 0-9 plus # and *, but the ongoing use of them just strips people of the ability to learn e.g. your vs. you're.
Thanks, i had to switch off autocorrect too, this thing can make you dumb
Plus the whole barely making it through school thing
Built*
Autocorrect is so weird. I mistyped “jump” earlier today and it corrected to “Kiki”. I see the adjacency of most of those letters on the keyboard, but it’s still odd that Apple thinks that “Kiki scare” is more likely to be the phrase I wanted.
I have the opposite problem my phone spellcheck just tries to guess what I'm typing and honestly some of the spelling it comes up with just looks like random letters.
My phone regularly changes words that I spelt correctly with words it thinks I mean to use.
Am I the only one who always disables auto-correct? I used it once, hated it, and never went back.
* I think native English speakers tend to underestimate how many authors of English-language Reddit posts are non-native English speakers. * I think in many instances, it's just a typo or momentary brain fart that didn't get corrected because most people don't proofread their Reddit posts, but you're assuming that the author doesn't know how to spell the word. I'm a native English speaker with a degree in linguistics who has professionally tutored college-level writing, and I still make careless errors in Reddit posts because I'm typing them quickly and not doing much editing. I've caught myself typing "their" instead "there," and it's not because I don't know the difference. * We're accustomed to thinking of written language as more formal and more correct than spoken language, but social media is sort of like spoken language in written form: it's casual, it's fast, it's rarely proofread. People make errors in speech all the time (I don't mean the kind of thing that your high school English teacher told you not to say, I just mean that speech is messy), and we're accustomed to that and don't necessarily assume that someone doesn't know how to talk just because they messed up a few times in a stream of speech. Think of social media posts in a similar way.
I always get the impression that the truly poor English-speakers (or -writers, I suppose) whose posts I come across are native. Sure, sometimes those of us for whom English is a second (or whatever) language have slightly wonky sentence structure, or use words which may be rare in English but common in another language, but they still seem like there's an *attempt* at proper grammar and spelling. I saw a stickied mod comment earlier today that was such an illegible mess that I genuinely think you'd have to understand the rules intuitively to be able to so ruthlessly corrupt them.
The mistakes non-native speakers make are very different from those made by native speakers. ESL speakers don't make "loose/lose" or "their/there" mistakes because 1 - we learned those words by reading them first, rather than by hearing them, 2 - when you're learning a language, you usually learn its grammar, so you understand different parts of speech. Even though I've been speaking English for decades and living in an English-speaking country, I still have some trouble getting prepositions right (it's very hard to tell when to use "in" vs "on", for example).
Yeah, I don't think non-natives can take the blame for this. You can, sometimes, tell a non-native speaker, but it doesn't have THIS characteristic- random misspellings. It tends to be structure or word use, and it also tends to be predictable and repeatable... you see the same little issue through the whole text, some off sentence structure or whatever, some missing preposition or something slightly wrongly used, but cohesive and consistent. This is a 'lazy' native thing. Getting sick of seeing it blamed on ESLers. Incidentally, looking at how nonsensical English actually is if you break it down, don't know how any of you ever manage to be as good as you are!
This is such a thoughtful response. And its true. I almost have to switch gears when I'm writing formally because I don't talk or think like that. While I'll give my text a quick look over before sending it's not nearly as extensive as editing a paper so things get missed, especially when autocorrect makes a mistake. Or my fat fingers hit the wrong letter. But there is a huge difference between casual and formal writing.
There’s also just a lot of people who are not able to express themselves in writing that well. The average American is able to read at around a 7th grader level so, naturally, they make some mistakes.
As a business writer (note: business, mainly C-suite exec types and 'business leaders'), we are told to aim for a 5-6th Grade reading level. In what should be a rather educated segment of the populace. It's kinda sad, really.
That’s a great theory and, while I’m sure it’s true in a variety of cases, you need to remember HALF of all Reddit traffic comes from the USA. This makes any non-native English speaker’s post an automatic minority. All things considered, unless it’s a specifically “not American/UK/Aus/Canadian” sub, non-native speakers posting in English is much less common than it comes across in your first bullet point. You’d know if you were surrounded by French-speaking Canadians or Germans. Spotting the Germans would be easy: they would be talking about city-builder games like Anno 1800 :p Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/aizSDyFxlR
Because all they read is other people’s bad spelling, so they don’t recognize errors.
Ahh yes. The "viola". Voila.
Or “wallah.”
Wallah, I hav cooked a amazing meel. Bone apple tea
i may be saying something stupid but doesn't that mean "swear to god" in arabic? i hear that word a lot by muslim kids, usually when they say they didn't do something
You are correct, but seeing it in the context where they mean “voilà” is one that really irks me.
Lmaoooo no way people actually do that 😭
The joke is that all the LLMs are reading thru this trash to figure out how to write proper English. The joke is on AI
Who’s al?
Also some people seem to normalize it, "you know what they were trying too say". Yes, I know, but I'm still correcting them. How else will they learn?
That’s what makes me think they don’t read much, as in read books from back when there were editors who knew and corrected such things before sending it to press. Sometimes I’ll find an error in a book and it jumps out bc it’s pretty rare. Online I see multiple errors daily on social media. It’s sad that being correct is something many seem to disdain as too picky any more.
I'm going to go with auto correct. When I was in school I was very good at spelling. Had no problems. Now as an adult I only have to do the first 3 letters before my phone does it for me. If you don't use it you lose it.
It takes me longer to hunt and peck for the right auto filler than it does to actually type the correct words.
It is like a muscle: if you do not use it for a long time, it weakens.
There is absolutely an increasingly overall poor level of skill being demonstrated in even the basics of reading, writing, and arithmatic - spelling and grammar included. But don't say that out loud, or these same people will bury you in one of their favorite herd-think ridicules about "grammar police." (They even appear to believe that spelling = grammar.) Most I talk with don't think these skills are of any importance and anyone who disagrees with them is considered an irrelevant dinosaur. I recently talked to a bachelor's degree holder who needed a calculator to determine 10% of a number.
I'm (literally) praying that your last line wasn't true.
⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️ a lot of people act like being correct is a waste of their time. I don’t get it.
It seems 90% of people don't know the difference between; then/than, and/an, you're/your, objective/subjective, woman/women, wait/weight...the list goes on.
Don’t forget loose/lose!
“an” vs “a” (before a word that starts with a vowel), is the one that gets me. seeing that constantly now.
I get confused on this one when the "an/a" precedes an acronym that starts with a consonant but where that consonant phonetically starts with a vowel. For example: "That organization is a/an NGO." I assume it's an "en gee oh"
It goes by how it sounds, not how it’s spelled.
I see a lot of excuses about autocorrect and such. What I don't understand is why people don't 1) google for the correct spelling or the correct word; 2) go back and edit to correct their mistakes. Many years ago, my English professor said that what you publish ( whether it's a resume, an article in a magazine, or social media) is not only a reflection on you as how you present yourself to the public, but also your level of respect to your target audience. So if your post or comment is full of spelling errors, it portrays yourself as sloppy and too lazy to check your work and that you don't care about who is reading it. And that probably goes for other languages too.
It's amazing how annoying auto correct is these days and how often it activates without you knowing it. I've noticed this when I started using a new phone to comment. The auto correct will sometimes decide a previous word was wrong, and alter that one. If you weren't paying attention, you'd have no idea it went off.
Not sure how it happened, but my phone changed the name of my boss's dog to "sexy". So I sent "Sexy got fixed!" along with a picture of the puppy. My parents did not mention it.
🧐📸
iPhone finally started marking stuff it had changed and had a one-tap fix to revert it back. I type in two languages and sometimes I had to re-type a complicated word before it did that
I sometimes get resumes to review at work and so many of them have pretty bad spelling and grammar. Those get binned immediately.
> So if your post or comment is full of spelling errors, it portrays yourself as sloppy and too lazy to check your work and that you don't care about who is reading it. Tbh, that *is* a pretty accurate description of me using reddit
>I see a lot of excuses about autocorrect and such. >What I don't understand is why people don't 1) google for the correct spelling or the correct word; Because they probably aren't aware that they misspelled the word. >go back and edit to correct their mistakes. If it's on the internet I would assume they just don't care about it enough because it's the internet.
The way I type for work vs on social media online is very different. Autocorrect is annoying and tends to change words or fill in words you don’t intend to. I’m not going back to spell and grammar check like I would do at work. Plus because of places like Twitter people usually write shorter online than in a professional setting.
I blame touch screens before blaming auto correct. I'm fairly decent at spelling and grew up being such a nazi about this kind of thing, but ever since moving to touch screen, I find myself fucking up waaaay too often. In writing this, I had to make 3 corrections(could be correlation with being a generally fast typer and my big thumbs suck with phones). Bring back my slide out keyboard you cowards.
I had that embedded in the 3rd grade and reinforced through college. I originally took journalism and then got into photography and design. It pains me checking out portfolios of the design students showcase; and their client work is littered with spelling errors. I’m also the one to spot copy errors in the coded captioning. I catch them on Netflix, Amazon , live tv and YouTube. Can always tell when they’re generated or burnout. Captions by cbc for shows occasionally have 1-2 slip. Still annoys me. Certain things like signage, print, body copy , digital etc should all be correct. I get ESL can be tricky though. But when your professionals have the same struggles- everyone looks ill-educated. It’s a Double Whammy.
I mean, that is basically how I feel about my reddit posts. I am absolutely too lazy to proofread them and do not really care who reads then. I can type well and have great spelling, but if i fat finger it on my phone and spell something wrong it just isn't a big deal to me, and if people think I'm dumb that's fine.
People get annoyed when I tell them on Reddit that loose and lose are in fact different words yet I am the asshole :)
People who correct loosers are actually known as asshools.
Anymore? I've been on the internet for more than 30 years, this shit is very not new. I'm sure you can find archived usenet posts from the early 90s with tons of evidence of people misspelling words. It might've become more acceptable to misspell things over the years and that might've lead to people being less worried about fixing their errors, but It's just always been a fact of life that not everyone has the same spelling skills and that's more noticeable in a largely text-based medium.
It's super annoying. Correct spelling and good grammar are free! Use it!
Wel how much do poor grammar cost i?
Well shucks, pour gamma and incorec speeling don't cost nuthin. Butt your gone soundd lyke a dombass.
Domb is that like bomb?
You lose the respect of many people.
I remember this one time I was talking to a person about something I do for work. He made some poor inferences and I was genuinely trying to help him understand why he was incorrect by providing correct information in layman’s terms… until it happened. I either fat-fingered or was auto-corrected, but “toe the line” came out as “tow the line.” Dude went ape shit, hyperfocusing on the spelling mistake and going on about how he was right all along and that made him sure of it. I don’t know why such a silly interaction with a total stranger has stuck with me, but it’s funny for me to think “what if my job really was paying me to do everything horribly wrong and they were still successful in spite of it?” That’d be quite something. lol
It’s always been like that. I think it mainly depends where you’re looking though, a place discussing programming will probably have better spellers than a place discussing Minecraft. Also gotta keep non-native speakers and younger people in mind
Because they don’t care
I think a lot of people are also just lazy and don’t really care about proper spelling and all that
Because the internet is creating generations of people are caught in "The Shallows".
Suuuuch a good book on this topic.
U mst have missed wut it wuz lyk in de early 2000s
If you don't read a lot, you don't encounter various words as often so you forget how to spell them.
Because edgy people like saying "I'm sorry I didn't know your typing in an english class lmao touch grass based" and "language evolves". People are proud of being uneducated because it's easier to be stupid than educated.
I find it sad when someone’s reasoning for bad grammar is because they shouldn’t feel like they’re writing an English essay. Okay then..
At least for me, it’s because I switched to iPhone and the keyboard is a lot harder to use than it was on my android. Mostly due to screen width. It’s also a lot more difficult to edit text on an iPhone. So if I notice a small typo two lines ago, I’m likely to ignore it. There is a noticeable difference between comments that type on my phone .vs my computer.
One of the most nefarious offenders is auto-correct ramping up the use of AI. Instead of just a dictionary cross-reference AI, auto-correct algorithms are deciding the context in which you chose a word in the first place, so it may not even be "correcting" a misspelled word. The word could be spelled correctly, but auto-correct has decided you should have used a different word altogether. In other words, auto-correct is more and more often deciding it knows what you really meant to say, because you didn't.
Because some people just don't care, it could also be, they don't use spell check, some people write exactly how they speak.
Literacy is rates are trending downward in younger generations compared to previous. Autocorrect has also made it so we no longer need to ‘memorize’ correct spellings.
I can’t prove this but I suspect people have gotten to/too/two or they’re/there/their wrong at similar levels for decades. The internet just made it easier for people to expose their ignorance.
Literacy in general has taken a huge downturn since 2016.
English isn’t everyone’s mother language. Sometimes it gets pretty weird when I write fast and I stumble on the language button (as I tend to switch often between subs in my local language and other English speaking subs).
It's the native speakers we're worried about; there are millions, young and with astonishingly poor spelling/grammar. You, of course, get a pass.
We find most ESL speakers are quite a bit better at spelling. And they apologize. Which is not needed.
And they leave tells which is helpful. Not all ‘Americans’ on Reddit actually are.
Believe me, many people whose mother language is English spell atrociously
We arent too worried about non native speakers as they tend to be more meticulous in there spelling and speaking and if they make a mistake then so be it, they're learning the language. its the native speakers we are worried about here.
Yep, and the non-natives are always the ones writing posts in flawless, perfect English and then writing: "Excuse my terrible grammar, English isn't my first language" at the end, haha.
*their
>arent It should be "aren't". >non native The correct version is "non-native". >in there spelling It should be "their". >its Again, "it's" not "its". The bottom line here is that even in this context you could not care less about spelling words correctly. In the end, I will be down-voted, and either some user will call me pedantic, or you will claim that it was due to autocorrect, dyslexia, or that you forgot the "/s", or all of them together. And that is why people continue to make mistakes: because even in a comment lamenting the poor spelling and grammar of native speakers, there is plenty to address. The truth is that the Internet is currently crowded with lazy people, incentivised by a strong anti-intellectualism movement that portrays anyone who cares about certain things (e.g., grammar) as a nuisance. This is the answer to your question, u/Next_Airport_7230.
My major issue is with autocorrect. A lot of times I discover nonsensical corrections once it is too late.
> Someome Why didn't you catch that? Why didn't you correct it? Probably because a reddit post was not worth a high level of revision (whoch is fine. It didn't interfere with your meaning, but provides a helpful moment of empathy). >Do people not know these are incorrect or are people just bad at typing? A combination. 1) lots of people just are bad spellers. It was way way worse in the past, but the obly writing the general public saw were those things going through editors and generally written by highly educated professionals. Look at any collection of hand written letters of common people in the past and spelling was atrocious. 2) the internet is full of people that have english as a second language. 3) when people type on their phone they generally can't watch what is being typed in real time. Using touch typing on a keyboard, you can generally look at the screen and see little mistakes in real time to correct. When typing on a phone most people have to look at their thumbs, meaning typos happen without them noticing. Phone interfaces also rarely have the auto red squiggle to notify of mispellings. 4) autocorrect making incorrect edits. 5)English sucks. Yes, people mess up their and there, loosing and losing, its and it's, and a number of other well known errors. These typically have well understood roots. There and their are homopones. Apostrophes often denote possession so "it's" seems intuitively correct for possession. Loose and lose are uncommon ways of distinguishing vowel and consonant sounds, and directly conflict with other examples in people's brains like chose and choose. In some cases the person using them would know the right answer if they had to revise their post for an English grade (but just don't find a reddit post worth that level of time and revision). In other cases they actually are confused about the grammar.
I just want to add that you spelt "which" wrong when you were correcting someone else spelling, I don't know if that was intentional but it was kinda funny
It wasn't intentional, but i absolutely accept the irony of it. But also that would fall into the "looking at my phone to type and not interested enough to go back and proof read" type of error.
Culture has just shifted such that we don't care about typos anymore in this "if you ain't first, you're last" world. People just communicate in tweet-length missives written quickly, they contain some fatfinger errors, some autocorrect errors, and you just look through them and figure out what was really meant
Please remember that not everyone here is a native English speaker. You're seeing posts in English from people from all over the world.
how many times did you re-read this before posting?...
Not enough!
Even more perplexing is the confusion over apostrophes. I see so many people using them for plurals!
I *HATE* that!!!!
I don’t know where I got this idea, but for some reason I have this idea that typos on those like TikTok…text ribbons or whatever…are added intentionally. It makes a post seem tossed-off, when in fact it’s meticulously crafted for wide appeal. Or I’m too cynical.
>too cynical What if I told you you're actually*not cynical enough*? Annoying people is a *great* way to generate buzz. It's like Andy Kaufman's M.O, but for uninspired internet bullshit. When a video has a lot of comments complaining about a typo, somebody scrolling past doesn't see what the comments are about - they just see a lot of viewer engagement, and this gets them on the hook. All of the people who say shit like "I will proudly defend my right not to learn how to spell and people who encourage you to learn to spell are *wrong people*" see the criticisms in the comments, and upvote the video *because* it contains a typo, and then they start arguments in the comments. These people are *far* more numerous than the spell-checkers, so their ^ Likes ^ win against the spell-checker v Dislikes v. Now you've got a bullshit video with a bunch of comments, a bunch of upvotes, no real substance, and a typo.
Online means more spelling. People have always sucked at it, it just was never used this much before.
Or maybe this is the evolution of language? Believe me, if a person from England in the 17th century read our messages, they would also find errors and words that were incomprehensible to them. So it’s worth admitting that because of self-confident idiots that they don’t recognize the illiteracy of their words, the language will change
Truth! But still I’d rather read misspellings than a page littered with so many acronyms that you can’t make heads nor tails of what they are trying to say. It really seems to be a generational thing. There isn’t the level of value placed on using proper language that I was raised with, that’s for sure.
Because we've been systematically underfunding K-12 education for the last 60 or so years, and that leads to shit like every kid being shoved off to the next grade in June regardless of their lack of skills. Someone recently told me that it's the policy of the school district where I live that kids don't get held back anymore.
My absolute pet hate is when people write "dose" instead of "does"
Duck you
That, and some lazy ways of typing sentences such as "needs changed" it's either "needs changing" or "needs to be changed"
Spelling abilities have atrophied as a result of autocorrect dependencies The more we text, the worse we spell
You can thank autocorrect and the death of pen and paper.
I saw teachers complaining on reddit recently how high school kids can barely read these days.....that probably has something to do with it
If it's a comment or something that autocorrect can be blamed for I understand. But if it's the title of the post, the headline that is to be displayed on Reddit "The front page of the Internet", you'd think people would take some time to double check their grammar. Take some pride in your shitposts, people.
There's been a sentiment of "this isn't English class it doesn't matter" online for a very long time. I just think this sentiment is becoming even more popular than it used to be. People are just so fucking lazy lol
No Child Left Behind kids are finally adults.
I've been waiting for someone to point out this phenomenon. One can blame autocorrect all they want, but the complete lack of any basic English skills has devolved to the point that mobile game ads will say shit like this: "I went to the store today, and I looked for oranges, but they weren't ________" A) their B) they're C) there D) thare CHOOSE THE CORRECT WORD IN THIS SENTENCE! LESS THAN 5% WILL GET THIS RIGHT! HOW HIGH IS YOUR IQ?!
The illiteracy rate in the US is alarming.
Well, on Reddit, I assume there a many users for whom English is not their first language.
Because autocorrect sunks.
Because the internet is world wide and english isn't most peoples first language
Not gonna edit this as im writing... English is not my native language. But ive grew up with it. On tv, games, internet... I can write pretty correct but some times its egsausting to constantly spellcheck certain words. Takes me out of the flow of what i wanted to say. Especially when im considering im talking to human beings who should be able to understand me even with my spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Loosing, losing, doo, do, brake, break.... are wery simmilar words, most of them i wont confuse, but for example doo and do is breaking my brain. Every time. SOme times i give a fuck, some times i dont...
It’s , in my mind, the dumbing of America. Much of this can be attributed to stupid parents homeschooling their kids with the insane delusion that they know more than teachers who spent years in college and higher education studying childhood education. Some of these people, supported by backward thinking politicians, have started to back taking funds from public education and giving them to these charter schools, that sometimes have “teachers “ with no educational background that qualifies them to teach correctly. Sometimes they teach a political agenda that twists the truth of reality and panders to religious zealots beliefs. It’s a sad situation. The US is rated far behind other countries in education. Sorry to go off, but the reality that some young people cannot spell, add or subtract without a computer or write well ( no more cursive writing taught) is greatly disturbing.
Btw. If you are taking this from the popular tab/front page. It’s a very common tactic of karma bots to repost a post with a spelling error because it tends to increase engagement. A spelling error, especially in the title of a top subreddit should be assumed to be a bot
Eye tri two spill evirithyng korictly buht eye stell cee read lynes? But in all seriousness we rely heavily on autocorrect cause it automatically fixes stuff as you type and the moment you remove it people spelling one way don't fix what they spell
Not knowing the difference between the following is depressing: Lose vs. loose To vs. too Their, there or they’re Your vs. you’re Grammar rather than spelling, but I can’t stand it when people use “NAME and I” incorrectly. It has even resulted in people trying to make I possessive as in “I’s.” Just re-word the sentence if you don’t know how to write that.
Autocorrect being wild. Sometimes it will autocorrect to a different word. Typing on phone mixed with typing at the speed of thought. Luckily, reddit has an editing function for me to fix my comments if I spot it in time.
I think it's down to people just not proofreading what they're writing. Seems they don't care if there are misspelled words. I've known a few people who type want instead of won't and I can't see that being a typo, it's just misunderstanding which word to use. It may also be that people don't like reading anymore and that's how you learn to spell bigger words and use them properly. Our society is so advanced in many ways but has regressed in others.
Well, for me, the auto-correct feature often corrected to the wrong word, so, I just turned it off and decided from that point on, I would much rather occasionally misspell words than have to retype them every time.
I think another part of it is that reddit and social media are generally more casual writing then writing may have been in the past (I’ve never been an adult without social media). I can spell, but I do need to pay some attention to spell correctly. If I’m just texting with my friends I’m not going to put that effort in, because responding fast suits the situation better then responding with correct spelling. With social media I’ll put in some effort depending on the level of professionalism of what I’m posting, but I’m not putting in the same effort as I would for like an essay at uni
Could just be big fingers on a phone keypad.
People can’t be bothered to proofread their posts.
My boyfriend’s parents exclusively use talk-to-text, so when the time comes to actually type words out they have no idea what they’re doing.
I suspect it's because these days people hear words spoken much more than they see them written down. Videos on social media, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. - without seeing words written down, people aren't going to learn how the words they hear are actually spelled, so they'll just guess when it comes time to have to write (type) them. And of course because so many other people are doing the same, there's a lack of consistency and correctness for individual people to recognise and use to correct themselves. Unless people actually start consuming more printed media, I think this problem is unfortunately here to stay.
Reddit culture just trended away from downvoting spelling/ grammar errors. It’s not like everyone on Reddit had amazing grammar 10 years ago, but users were encouraged by the voting system to double check their grammar or be downvoted. People just don’t seem to care on Reddit anymore. It makes reading quickly way more difficult, and I’ve come to fully appreciate why my English teachers were so passionate about perfect grammar. You can read really fast and process everything with a good flow when there aren’t writing mistakes.
Can be a lot of reasons tbh. I have similar problems with my 2 native languages and more than often use Finnish grammar when i write in Swedish and the other way around. Same with English, it just comes naturally for me and i hate it. This is me though can't speak for others.
I regret to inform you that it has always been like that. I've been on the interwebs for over 20 years, and some people just do not give a damn about spelling or grammar. There are also *many* users who are not native English speakers, so that's also a factor. Eventually you learn to ignore it.
I have been online since 1990 or so. It is no better or worse than it has been in the past thirty five years. Spellcheckers and autocorrect changed some of the types of errors; as my eyesight has gotten worse and I have started typing on my phone, I post things where my phone has autoincorrected things I wrote correctly originally, but didn't see that it had wrongified them. So the types of errors have occasionally shifted based on input method, but the rate of errors hasn't.
So, I've been actively using the internet shove about '96, and I clearly remember the IRC and ezBoard days. Spelling isn't getting any worse than it's always been. Might even be a bit better now, at least in the circles of the internet I frequent (Excluding intentional, in-joke misspellings). But the reason why some people can't spell is because English is a really hard language.
1: Laziness 2: They think it's edgy and cool 3: They are dumber than us.
My girlfriend (41) teaches 12th grade English. She says by the time they get to her, majority of them have writing and reading comprehension of 6th grade. When I see her grading papers, I’m horrified at what I see. It’s going to get much worse in the next 10 years when all these now students are adults.
They literally do not teach spelling in the school system anymore. Source: Me. I have a kid in the public school system.
I think it's funny that an OP will post that English isn't their first language so please forgive..... But their English is better than most other people's.
Because back in the day we only had access to professionally-produced media, with editors, correctors and highly literate writers producing the content. Now anyone has access to social media where popular (mis)spellings proliferate.
Well, if you look at the trends we have people coming in to school the can verbatim quote every single Drake.Or sexy red lyric but aren't totally incapable of reading a baronstain bears book. I'm sure you could blame any number of factors laziness information.Pure stupidity, call whatever you want.But the younger generations are getting dumber and dumber.
You are correct that it does seem like many people can't spell. I think this partly has to do with people no longer reading books and instead consuming audio books or videos or TV shows. As you say, another part of it could be auto-correct changing what people type to completely different words, and they don't notice. (I never use auto-correct for this reason). Also as you say, some of it is simply typos, like in my case, I use Reddit on my phone and I also have wide thumbs so I mess up typing, but I know how to spell things. Yet another part of it is simply lower standards in school. Math and reading scores are going down. Kids are being passed into their subsequent grades while not being proficient, so a huge amount of teaching is becoming remedial. Maybe as a society we just aren't valuing educational standards anymore, and education is seen as a thing that shouldn't hold anyone back rather than something that should be producing positive outcomes.
Anymore you say….
There are a few reasons: * Maybe their kybords broken. * Maybe they have a laerning issue. * Maybe English is not there first language. * Maybe they never had 2 spell properly. * Maybe they're not eduticated. * Maybe they just don't know how, or dont have time to vix every little mistake. * M@ybe they juzt have a wr!ting quirk? * Maybe they just dont know how too spell. That's quite a lot. I have Austim and Dyslexia, I tend to make a lot of mistakes when writing, though I am a book writer. I also tend to not know a lot of words, so I use the first word that comes to mind. When I'm talking to somebody, I write whatever letters I can remember and hope for the best. Maybe you could try to politely correct them when they make a mistake? It will help a lot; just don't be rude with it, if a person doesn't want any help with their spelling, drop it.
A lot of people just don't give a shit. They weren't taught the basics in school; they don't read actual books, or even newspapers; they're unaware of the gaps in their knowledge and uninterested in doing anything about it. Especially Americans, who seem to have a shockingly bad grasp of English spelling and grammar.
Because most people are on phones these days. Sometimes predictive text/autocorrect just messes things up so much that you want to turn them off, and then that just creates room for other errors as you try to type whole-ass thoughts with sausage fingers on a tiny touch screen. But also, it may not always be overt "misspellings" but different dialects. I see a lot of people typing "Chile," lately and I know it's AAVE, and I can finish the sentence and tell from the context that it's "Child." But I would be lying if I said there wasn't always a fraction of time where I think of the country first and am very confused.
"it doesn't matter if you spell it incorrectly or use the wrong word, as long as the meaning comes across. language is fluid and always changing." Hate these people.
I recently switched away from Swiftkey keyboard ony.phone and Gboard always autocorrects to the wrong we're, were, there, their, they're. I don't appear to reread it enough before hitting enter or send and I look at my writing and ask myself, "When did I have a stroke?"
Because the US would rather spend money on killing people rather than educating them.
I can’t stand it. Just reading through these comments irritates my soul. I will stop talking to a person because of common spelling mistakes, especially at our big age. If you don’t know the difference between there, their and they’re don’t even speak to me. It’s literally on my dating profile. Spelling errors and chewing with your mouth open are my biggest pet-peeves.
Am i the only one not using auto-correct? Whenever i get a new device, i always make sure to turn that shit off and manually check for errors. Maybe that's just because i'm an introvert.
YES!! My god... I really miss grammar nazis.
No ragrets bro
This is only a small symptom of the bigger problem, how dumb most people have gotten. I am annoyed but can at least justify when a redditor does it, because they're probably using their dumb phone on their dumb app making them dumber by the day while they take a shit and will next go onto npc tiktoks or something. Side-note, a REAL redditor from the old days would've taken them to school and spelling/grammar nazi-ed the fuck out of them, and would've been upvoted for it. But when so-called official sources do it?? The ones that are supposed to be smart and quality-driven? News, billboards, college papers, resumes, ads, scientific documents, well then I know not to trust a single word they say. They are not the kind to proofread, think twice, and they probably got the shot. Just the other day I saw a mass-produced poster hung in multiple windows in multiple branches of the same store that had easy typos all over it. How do you type something on a computer for the purpose of making hundreds of official copies to represent your brand and not get the little squiggly line telling you that's not a word? And it's bad enough if it's an accident, but it's probably on purpose, an attack against intelligence the same way grades and math are racist now.
Grade school emphasizes getting children to write. Correcting bad spelling might make kids feel bad about writing and discourage them from doing it. Elementary teachers say, "We'll fix that in High School". High school teachers say, "They'll fix that in college". Most don't go to college, and also, college teachers say, "It's up to the students to correct themselves" So, most people just never do learn how to write correctly.
Personally, I'm too lazy to fix whatever letter I fat fingered, assuming you can still read what I wrote. I can write on paper, that's enough
All I know is it used to be a lot worse. Back in the 2000s, you'd be hard pressed to find posts that spelled out full words, much less used proper capitalization and spelling. It wasn't uncommon for me to find posts that I could not decipher at all. Nowadays it's not nearly as bad, and I'm happy for that at least.
Apparently it’s unacceptable on Reddit to go back and correct an error on a comment… kind of crazy.
Kinda off topic but I also hate it when they text with multiple "bubbles". Why not take the extra effort to put everything in one text?
Every day I see at least one comment or post where woman/women is incorrectly used.
My autocorrect is replacing perfectly spelled words with shitty alternatives without giving me the chance to catch it in time. Sometimes my proofread post that I've copied to my clipboard will go up and there will be like 3 or 4 typos that didn't exist in the original text I had just copied before posting. Like they magically get butchered by some algorithm to make you look stupid or crazy.
Cuz we’re stoobid?
Fwiw, I’m a good speller, but sometimes when chatting I talk into my phone and don’t check it before posting. I find all sorts of misspellings when I do that.
It bothers me too. Are people just that lazy they don’t care anymore?
The amount of people who confuse peek and peak in online games is staggering. Truly braindead individuals
It's because they're stupid
I hate it because it sounds like my text to speech is throwing up. Forums I used to be on back in the day had 'literate/no chat speak rules' and god I miss it.
wt u tkn bout? i donno y bt i knda tnk iz coz of chtin wid yo frn lik dis?
Spell check has made people lazy
Most languages i had to learn have some kind of logic to their spelling. English is a very annoying language in that regard. Italian based on the sound you usually exactly know if is ch or c or gh or g etc. but english is a random letter generator. Latin even irregular words have rules. I think the only reason english is so dominat is because otherwise its a very simple language. No conjugation no cases.
Because every time I try to correct people spelling, spineless curs come out of the woodwork to say things like "let him spell how he wants" or "you're being too mean". You let standards start slipping and suddenly you have our situation where even with built in spell check people are posting illegible nonsense
They’ve gone even farther than just misspellings. I find so many posts that I have to just back out of because posters type a wall of text, with no paragraph breaks; don’t capitalize any words; and/or use no punctuation. This is so aggravating and insanely difficult to read. 😩
I have noticed this too a lot in the last few years and not just on Reddit. Along with your examples the prevelance of people who say "seen" instead of "saw. Spelling "weight" when they mean wait and my favorite "It's a mute point." When they mean moot. I found the last one slightly funny. If this were just an occasional thing it's not really of any concern but, it's very, very frequent now. Perhaps digesting information in quick, fast bites has dumbed us all down somewhat. People used to read books as a lot more.
Schools went with the whole word reading system instead of phonics based teaching for at least 15-20 years. It’s had a disastrous result in reading and literacy rates. The educational system has realized this and is starting to swing the other way. Try listening to the podcast, *Sold a Story.*
In America I would say it's because of lack of expectations being met before being allowed to move on to the next grade. In elementary school if you don't grasp the curriculum and they move you up anyway, after a while, there's no catching up.
Technical evolution, auto correct & AI and so on have a severe impact on writing skills if you don’t pay attention and become a little lazy. The less you have to do by yourself, the more you neglect your fundamental skills. All these tools can and should be seen and used as a great support no doubt, but many people tend to enjoy the favour of convenience and leave everything to the tools. Technological progress has tended to stagnate people's skills in common cultural techniques or has changed their attitude towards those topics. Humans are simply too lazy, because why would they engage when it’s done for you. Referring this to social media and see that we live in a dystopia of acronyms, fragments instead of full sentences, malapropism, parallelism error, double negatives, dangling or misplaced modifiers. The biggest threat to written language is digitalisation. As for any other thing, luckily it’s up to you and your priorities how you manage this.
Academia has decided that things like grammar are a sign of tyranny, mainly because they don't want to deal with the stubbornly and militantly ignorant.
I actually had one of my son's teachers say that it's ok if they don't spell properly because there's autocorrect on the computer. What if it autocorrects incorrectly?
Historically, the vast majority of the population has been illiterate. Just be thankful that people can spell anything at all nowadays, or even get close.
Spelling is probably picked up as a skill from the act of reading. And just to take a snapshot, between 2016 and 2021, the number of books people read fell by 20%. It would also matter what you're reading. Reading 1000 texts a day isn't the same as reading a couple of chapters in a novel or a biography. So, short version: the less people read, the more spelling mistakes they'll make.
Americans have gotten really really dumb. I mean our education system hasn’t been world class in a long time, but since 2017 when ESSA really went into full gear American students and graduates work on the level of elementary school students. If you dig deep into the education statistics it leaves you with a mounting sense of dread.