People easily mistake neurodivergent speech patterns and communication styles for run-of-the-mill pretentiousness.
I don’t want to get too specific right now, but a lot of people who are neurodivergent (namely autistic, but there’s lots of overlap) struggle with communication. To them, writing/typing may be far easier and more natural than speaking aloud, but it can still come off as unusually formal, overly precise, or more awkwardly structured than usual. Sometimes it’s interpreted as “pretentiousness” because it doesn’t have the same casual cadence many neurotypical writers may use.
This.
wait people consider this offensive?
Not offensive so much as irritating, I guess. It’s low-hanging fruit and easy to mock whenever people pick up on something “off” about you.
Other times, people assume that you employ formal language or “advanced” vocabulary because you’re trying too hard to sound intelligent or superior. What you intend to be clear and specific may be interpreted as condescension.
The curse goes deeper; you can look back at your own writing days/months/years later and think, “Wow. Who’s the pretentious dickbag who wrote that?!” and then
My AP English teacher in high school told me my writing was “too stuffy.”
I’m Autistic and without that key detail I’m often told I’m being condescending when I’m just trying to be clear and efficient via text.
I also tend to try to balance out my line count per paragraph/statement so it looks nice… Which can come off as weird, I guess.
It causes me to sometimes overcompensate with informality, which is even stranger to people I’m not actually familiar with.
So you’re either talking to formal me or you’re taking to YEET me and there’s like no in between, and either way it’s odd to people.
i know why this happens!
ok, so when we (autistics) learn to read and write, we learn the rules. And because of our black and white thinking we stick to the rules. And that’s great because for a lot of us written words with its explicit rules are SO MUCH EASIER….
BUT!
Spoken language doesn’t follow the same rules, and almost all of spoken language is implicitly learned.
Literally, no one teaches us the rules that go with talking verbally so we fall back on what we know – written grammar, which is an academic rules set.
The reason why we sound pretentious is because we are speaking formally and academically – and therefore pretentiously- instead of academically.
I’m sure some of the linguistic spin autistics could expand on this more than I can from the limited perspective of sociology.
is there a word for “i was instantly good at a lot of things as a quote-unquote gifted child, and, as a result, i was able to skate by without ever being taught how to actually learn a new skill, and now that i’m an adult trying to learn new things that i can’t be good at instantaneously, i don’t have the patience or knowledge to improve on them, because skills that don’t come naturally to me just make me angry because i lived off instant gratification my whole childhood due to not ever being challenged intellectually or taught basic learning skills?” asking for a friend
people like this piss me the fuck off
why does everyone refuse to consider the possibility that maybe an education system designed from the ground up to turn intelligent and creative children into mindlessly efficient factory drones might have a negative effect on the people it deems (correctly or not; usually not) to be more intelligent and creative than average?
we were punished for “learning too fast” by having the lessons about how to learn taken away from us, and by couching it all in positive language so that our peers would resent and isolate us. literally all of us know we’re not better than anyone else, but that doesn’t seem to matter in the face of “i was jealous in elementary school and have held on to that for 15+ years.”
when we say things like “i don’t know how to learn things that i don’t immediately understand” you hear “i was that kid you hated because i never studied but i always got a 100% on the test anyway,” but what we mean is:
i have a vague understanding of what a flash card is, but no idea how to make them or what to do with them
i have literally no idea how to take notes because:
i don’t know what i’ll forget if i don’t write it down
i don’t know how to pay attention to what’s being said while i write
i wouldn’t know what to do with the notes anyway
if i don’t understand something, i don’t know how to formulate a question
i don’t know how to recognize when i don’t know something until it goes wrong, at which point i don’t know how to identify what i did wrong
i can’t tell the difference between a mistake that’s part of the learning process and a mistake where i should know better
but yeah, if we ever acknowledge any of this, we’re definitely just being ungrateful whiners who don’t realize how good we had it when we were 7
This is also backed by Science! and is a fairly well understood thing. Studies show that if you have a neurodevelopmental diagnoses (which includss ASD and ADHD), then the higher your IQ is the more likely you are to fail either school or college and to fail at work. This called the twice gifted or 2g problem.
I’m a fucking graduate student, and I near had a meltdown that took me several days to recover from because I had an exam on Monday and I had no fucking clue how to study for it.
I took my exam after studying (including a few days of cramming) for a week, which was an amazing milestone because normally I don’t study until the day before. Not because “I’m so awesome that I don’t need to study” but “I have no fucking clue how to study, so I’m going to wait until absolute desperation to get started.” (I also have ADHD and other disabilities, so those certainly affect the process, but it still stands that not having a clue how to study is a big part.
I tried making flash cards. But what do you put on them?? like, I can make flash cards for definitions, a word on one side and the other side the definition, but every thing else? how does it work???
my notes were – and almost always are impossible to study with because I don’t know how to take them. Either I try to type as fast as I can and write word for word what the professor says, or I just type what is on the overhead (and I’m completely screwed if the professor only has pictures on the slides). I learned that if it’s written on the board, it better be in my notes but more than that? No clue.
And I’m a graduate student.
This isn’t “ohh I’m so smart,” it’s “I never learned these basic skills and now feel ridiculous that I can’t do them.” This adds to the anxiety and depression and overall feeling of hopelessness that I already had, which makes it even more of a challenge to do basic things…like study a bit each night (study what? how much? when?)
THIS THIS THIS RIGHT HERE!
No one every thought me how to take notes from lectures. From books. From other sources. No one taught me how to organize those things, to study from those things, to prepare myself.
No one taught me because until my Sophomore year in high school, the material was so easy for me that I never had to do those things. Everyone assumed that I was just smart. And yes, I was. I was very book smart. I could read a book and remember what was written.
But then it wasn’t easy. I had to make intuitive connections, I had to reorganize my teachers’ words and books’ words into notes so that I could remember things in “my own words” – regurgitation was no longer acceptable.
And this is where I am now. Somewhere between first and second year in my university classes and I am having to figure out how to do all of this on the fly.
Why? Because by the time I had the cognitive ability to actually do all these tasks and by the time people figured out how to teach me to absorb material and spit it out in my own words… I wasn’t in school any more – for almost 20 years.
By the time I got into university, I have the cognitive ability (holy crap I understand statistics and can explain it!) but there is just so much information I can’t keep track of it.
I am almost 40 years old, this is like my fourth or fifth semester in uni, and just a few weeks ago I figured out a method of taking notes and doing homework that works for me.
All this because I was “smart” or something.
Fucking this^^^^ I’m currently going for my mastery and I’m still having *so many problems* taking actual notes and learning.
I asked, and asked and asked but nobody really explains it and I’m still *stuck* especially since most of the ressources I know are in English and my uni course is in french.
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