"Bleak" seems about right
May 13, 2025 5:08 AM Subscribe
An interesting take on a fairly depressing study about English majors' reading abilities. Spoiler: most can't read.
Some interesting observations here, but the [Tumblr] author’s stubborn refusal to capitalize even where it’s necessary for clarity about what they’re saying, or to edit with any care generally, is really off-putting in this context.
posted by jon1270 at 5:43 AM on May 13 [36 favorites]
posted by jon1270 at 5:43 AM on May 13 [36 favorites]
The study listed the no-longer-contemporary references as a positive for what they were trying to test, but I’m not convinced that such historic cultural knowledge should be considered an important component of reading proficiency. Being able to make educated guesses to fill in the blanks, or look up unfamiliar details perhaps, and perhaps that is what they were trying to get at with that? But the combination of anachronistic references and - by modern standards - anachronistic prose structure in the excerpt used I think might bump the task over into measuring more background cultural knowledge and less what they actually want to measure about reading proficiency?
posted by eviemath at 5:45 AM on May 13 [16 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 5:45 AM on May 13 [16 favorites]
anachronistic prose structure in the excerpt used I think might bump the task over into measuring more background cultural knowledge and less what they actually want to measure about reading proficiency
This is my takeaway too. I’m a strong reader (granted, I’m not an English lit degree holder though), but if you dropped me into a Dickens novel cold with someone staring at me and a time limit I’m not sure how good I’d be at deciphering it either.
I think some of the best reading education I received in high school were from teachers who used multiple ways to explore a story. They used video, had us act stuff out, had us write poetry or short stories inspired by what we read, etc. Sitting there alone having to trudge through a dusty old story deemed canon by dusty old men seems the most uninspiring and unenriching way to approach learning about a story.
posted by eekernohan at 6:09 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
This is my takeaway too. I’m a strong reader (granted, I’m not an English lit degree holder though), but if you dropped me into a Dickens novel cold with someone staring at me and a time limit I’m not sure how good I’d be at deciphering it either.
I think some of the best reading education I received in high school were from teachers who used multiple ways to explore a story. They used video, had us act stuff out, had us write poetry or short stories inspired by what we read, etc. Sitting there alone having to trudge through a dusty old story deemed canon by dusty old men seems the most uninspiring and unenriching way to approach learning about a story.
posted by eekernohan at 6:09 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
Agree a bit with eviemath in that the cultural differences seem a bit unfair, as seen here:
posted by vacapinta at 6:10 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
Original Text: LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and theI doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Subject: And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor”
is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would
go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like
a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The
student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K.,
so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so,
Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers,
I’m just gonna skip that.]
posted by vacapinta at 6:10 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
The article is fascinating to me, because it makes clear what I always found so perplexing about other kids in class with me. I was almost always in advanced English or AP lit or niche literature college courses, starting around 2nd grade when I was pulled out of class a few times a week to go do bonus nerd stuff in the library with my fellow bookworms. But inevitably there would be a group project or a partnered conversation and these people just. Couldn’t. Read.
For the most part I despised every assigned book in school apart from Shakespeare, until 10th grade when I got to do a project on Slaughterhouse Five. So it’s not like I had fun reading all of it. Fun reading was always outside of class. I trudged through all the abysmal short stories and history texts and the accursed summer reading lists. But I understood them. Maybe not immediately, but if they didn’t make any damn sense I’d reread pieces and ask what things meant and use glossaries until they untangled.
And then I’d have to talk about this reading with other students and they would be wildly off from my understanding. Doing English homework with my friends was impossible. There was an entire three months where our lit teacher taught us how to answer short form essay questions, and I was furious by the first week because I didn’t understand that this was something that needed to be taught - just answer the question about the text in a few sentences! Jeez! (My physicist compsci math nerd brother once pointed out to me that my anger about this was ironic considering my inability to just do calculus, but I was too teenaged to agree.)
The article is elucidating, providing real insight for me into the thought processes and challenges of people who don’t have my specific advantages and wonky brain issues. In particular I’m thinking of my best friend in middle school, who I had to explain Grendel to in about nine thousand different ways before she seemed to get it. She is smart as a whip and extremely talented in her field as an adult, but never quite had the reading bug.
I am not inclined to join in with bemoaning the illiteracy of the youths, however. Yes, reading comprehension is a skill that has to be fostered and right now it’s clear that we are not doing so culturally or educationally. But, I don’t think an inability to slog through the horrendously ponderous writing of Dickens under pressure without a bunch of preliminary historical information points directly to what that gap really is. So I love the article, and the tumblr post is an insightful take from a teacher’s perspective, but neither is answering the questions that they are posing, as far as I can tell.
posted by Mizu at 6:17 AM on May 13 [33 favorites]
For the most part I despised every assigned book in school apart from Shakespeare, until 10th grade when I got to do a project on Slaughterhouse Five. So it’s not like I had fun reading all of it. Fun reading was always outside of class. I trudged through all the abysmal short stories and history texts and the accursed summer reading lists. But I understood them. Maybe not immediately, but if they didn’t make any damn sense I’d reread pieces and ask what things meant and use glossaries until they untangled.
And then I’d have to talk about this reading with other students and they would be wildly off from my understanding. Doing English homework with my friends was impossible. There was an entire three months where our lit teacher taught us how to answer short form essay questions, and I was furious by the first week because I didn’t understand that this was something that needed to be taught - just answer the question about the text in a few sentences! Jeez! (My physicist compsci math nerd brother once pointed out to me that my anger about this was ironic considering my inability to just do calculus, but I was too teenaged to agree.)
The article is elucidating, providing real insight for me into the thought processes and challenges of people who don’t have my specific advantages and wonky brain issues. In particular I’m thinking of my best friend in middle school, who I had to explain Grendel to in about nine thousand different ways before she seemed to get it. She is smart as a whip and extremely talented in her field as an adult, but never quite had the reading bug.
I am not inclined to join in with bemoaning the illiteracy of the youths, however. Yes, reading comprehension is a skill that has to be fostered and right now it’s clear that we are not doing so culturally or educationally. But, I don’t think an inability to slog through the horrendously ponderous writing of Dickens under pressure without a bunch of preliminary historical information points directly to what that gap really is. So I love the article, and the tumblr post is an insightful take from a teacher’s perspective, but neither is answering the questions that they are posing, as far as I can tell.
posted by Mizu at 6:17 AM on May 13 [33 favorites]
The reason (a reason) it's so shocking is that besides a few historically-specific notes like vacapinta points out above, those paragraphs of Dickens are very easy to read. You don't need a history degree to know what mud and fog are. Dickens is not a modernist trying to present you with an experimental style only suited for close-reading.
That said, the experiment is also a little weird because 'translation' already implies these are sentences difficult to read without assistance (they're not), and having to explain them to someone else sentence-by-sentence, the reader misses out on the cumulative effect and the sense of motion as we travel through the streets into the court.
The tumblr person makes an interesting point: "struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense." That's so sad! I don't even know how we get to this point. That is, if you are read to when you're little (and even when you're older), if you're presented with books and stories of gradually growing complexity, if you're not ridiculed for not getting it, it feels like you'd get to the point where you understood the sense in what you're reading. Otherwise...well, otherwise we live in a very scary time.
posted by mittens at 6:22 AM on May 13 [27 favorites]
That said, the experiment is also a little weird because 'translation' already implies these are sentences difficult to read without assistance (they're not), and having to explain them to someone else sentence-by-sentence, the reader misses out on the cumulative effect and the sense of motion as we travel through the streets into the court.
The tumblr person makes an interesting point: "struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense." That's so sad! I don't even know how we get to this point. That is, if you are read to when you're little (and even when you're older), if you're presented with books and stories of gradually growing complexity, if you're not ridiculed for not getting it, it feels like you'd get to the point where you understood the sense in what you're reading. Otherwise...well, otherwise we live in a very scary time.
posted by mittens at 6:22 AM on May 13 [27 favorites]
I have to admit, I've always considered myself a pretty strong reader, and yet this first sentence:
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
is almost completely opaque to me. I had a vague idea that "Michaelmas" is an archaic holiday, like "Candlemas"... never heard of "Lincoln's Inn Hall", and a Lord Chancellor could be... a university official, since they're talking about a "term"? Don't some English universities call one of their terms "Michaelmas"? I flunked this test hard. Granted, I would have been able to figure out by the next few paragraphs that they are in fact talking about a judge in a court. But just on the first sentence, no way. But isn't part of successful reading being able to file away those mysterious things until you get to the next paragraph, where it then becomes clear?
posted by Daily Alice at 6:23 AM on May 13 [28 favorites]
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
is almost completely opaque to me. I had a vague idea that "Michaelmas" is an archaic holiday, like "Candlemas"... never heard of "Lincoln's Inn Hall", and a Lord Chancellor could be... a university official, since they're talking about a "term"? Don't some English universities call one of their terms "Michaelmas"? I flunked this test hard. Granted, I would have been able to figure out by the next few paragraphs that they are in fact talking about a judge in a court. But just on the first sentence, no way. But isn't part of successful reading being able to file away those mysterious things until you get to the next paragraph, where it then becomes clear?
posted by Daily Alice at 6:23 AM on May 13 [28 favorites]
There's a pretty big difference between not being able to read in general and not being able to parse some particularly dense descriptive prose from Dickens that requires historical context. You'd certainly hope that an English major could figure this passage out in 20 minutes, but presenting it as them being unable to read is a little much.
posted by ssg at 6:24 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
posted by ssg at 6:24 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
I just popped over and read the first 7 paragraphs of Bleak House. You can’t really rewrite them in contemporary language in a way that’s meaningful. It feels fundamentally unfair as a test. Besides that prose wasn’t written to be simply comprehended, it was written to be bathed in.
Indeed it seems possible that Dickens chose to write the opening of the book in this way to convey to the reader something like what it feels like to visit the court of chancery.
posted by tehgubner at 6:26 AM on May 13 [26 favorites]
Indeed it seems possible that Dickens chose to write the opening of the book in this way to convey to the reader something like what it feels like to visit the court of chancery.
posted by tehgubner at 6:26 AM on May 13 [26 favorites]
71 percent of the problematic readers (or 35 of the 49) had no idea that Dickens was focusing on a court of law, a judge, and lawyers. Their misunderstanding happened even though “Chancery” (a specific type of English court where the head Judge [the “Lord Chancellor”] and other judges would make decisions on legal trusts, divisions of property, the property of “lunatics,” and the guardians for infants and orphans [“Chancery Division”]) and “Lincoln’s Inn Hall” (the building that held the Court of Chancery [“Illustration”]) are mentioned in the first sentence as well as in the passage’s ending with its talk of solicitors and a long list of law documents... "bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them"
well, yeah. America basically doesn't have Chancellors, "solicitors," "chancery court," "masters' reports", etc. No wonder people struggled to work out what this all was: it's just barely at the edge of comprehensibility ("affidavits" and "injunctions" are familiar) without looking it up.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:27 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
well, yeah. America basically doesn't have Chancellors, "solicitors," "chancery court," "masters' reports", etc. No wonder people struggled to work out what this all was: it's just barely at the edge of comprehensibility ("affidavits" and "injunctions" are familiar) without looking it up.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:27 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
and sure, if you are fairly skilled at close reading, you might pick out "affidavit" and go "aha, this must be some type of court" and then retroactively update your understanding of what's going on. it certainly seems like almost all the test subjects couldn't do that, which is... admittedly not great
posted by BungaDunga at 6:30 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 6:30 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
that said the bits where the subject decides that "whiskers" must mean there's a cat somewhere, or their best guess as to a figurative reference to a dinosaur is that there just is a dinosaur is... a lot
this does explain why SparkNotes holds people's hands so much though, I always assumed it was for people who literally hadn't read it, but it turns out it was also for people who had read it but not actually understood half of what was happening
posted by BungaDunga at 6:37 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
this does explain why SparkNotes holds people's hands so much though, I always assumed it was for people who literally hadn't read it, but it turns out it was also for people who had read it but not actually understood half of what was happening
posted by BungaDunga at 6:37 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
But isn't part of successful reading being able to file away those mysterious things until you get to the next paragraph, where it then becomes clear?
That's what I would think. The ability to use mental placeholders for things while seeing if more information is going to be provided. Sort of like linguistic algebra. "Solve this text for a value of 'Michaelmas'"
But I wonder if some people get blocked as soon as there is some unknown or ambiguity.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:39 AM on May 13 [23 favorites]
That's what I would think. The ability to use mental placeholders for things while seeing if more information is going to be provided. Sort of like linguistic algebra. "Solve this text for a value of 'Michaelmas'"
But I wonder if some people get blocked as soon as there is some unknown or ambiguity.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:39 AM on May 13 [23 favorites]
It does suggest that a lot of people are basically not reasoning about text any more than "locally"- ie, not holding onto things between successive paragraphs. so if they can't work something out immediately they just file it away as incomprehensible and move on rather than being able to apply meaning forwards and backwards through the text
posted by BungaDunga at 6:46 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 6:46 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
Imx I taught a year of middle grades reading on an Agreement to Earn (before switching to ELA/ESOL) and this surprises me not at all. This is the outcome of teaching students to read information text at a frustration level for “success” on a standardized test.
The assumption in Florida school reading programs was that reading hard informational passages about unfamiliar topics would level testing outcomes because both stronger readers and struggling ones would be equally at sea in an unfamiliar topic.
Thus the struggling reader who made the best use of cold reading strategies (reading headings, making predictions, skimming and scanning etc) could do equal or better than the proficient reader who relied on vocabulary or background knowledge to help them make meaning. I wish I were joking.
A lot of reading and ELA programs shift into test prep mode several times a year for various reasons. My school (95+% free/reduced lunch) took some College Board tests for calibration, in exchange I think for a cheaper rate on Springboard texts.
TLDR if all you do is reading test prep, you’re not teaching reading.
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:57 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
The assumption in Florida school reading programs was that reading hard informational passages about unfamiliar topics would level testing outcomes because both stronger readers and struggling ones would be equally at sea in an unfamiliar topic.
Thus the struggling reader who made the best use of cold reading strategies (reading headings, making predictions, skimming and scanning etc) could do equal or better than the proficient reader who relied on vocabulary or background knowledge to help them make meaning. I wish I were joking.
A lot of reading and ELA programs shift into test prep mode several times a year for various reasons. My school (95+% free/reduced lunch) took some College Board tests for calibration, in exchange I think for a cheaper rate on Springboard texts.
TLDR if all you do is reading test prep, you’re not teaching reading.
posted by toodleydoodley at 6:57 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
[breathing heavily]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 7:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
[Tumblr] author’s stubborn refusal to capitalize even where it’s necessary for clarity about what they’re saying, or to edit with any care generally, is really off-putting in this context
[Tumblr] author
[Tumblr]
It's formatted and written like a tumblr post, big shocker. I did not find any capitalization necessary to follow what they were saying, and the prevalence of this reflexive pooh-poohing of the link is a really tiresome aspect of this website.
posted by coolname at 7:02 AM on May 13 [25 favorites]
[Tumblr] author
[Tumblr]
It's formatted and written like a tumblr post, big shocker. I did not find any capitalization necessary to follow what they were saying, and the prevalence of this reflexive pooh-poohing of the link is a really tiresome aspect of this website.
posted by coolname at 7:02 AM on May 13 [25 favorites]
this does explain why SparkNotes holds people's hands so much though, I always assumed it was for people who literally hadn't read it, but it turns out it was also for people who had read it but not actually understood half of what was happening
Yeah SparkNotes seems to be doing the work that a patient teacher with a manageable class size might be doing for a struggling reader tbh.
I agree that the structure of the test ("translate" these sentences) isn't necessarily revealing the students' purest ability to read. Surely a better way would have been to have them read the paragraphs aloud, read them silently, and then explain to the researcher what is happening in them, no? "Plain English" is also a weird term to apply here; references to specific institutions, people, and places aren't, like, some kind of "weird English," it's all part of plain English.
But I do think that the post author is correct when they identify part of the problem as "readers don't expect text to make sense and do not consider that something to solve when reading," and as such are unlikely to get either concrete or abstract meaning from a chunk of it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:03 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Yeah SparkNotes seems to be doing the work that a patient teacher with a manageable class size might be doing for a struggling reader tbh.
I agree that the structure of the test ("translate" these sentences) isn't necessarily revealing the students' purest ability to read. Surely a better way would have been to have them read the paragraphs aloud, read them silently, and then explain to the researcher what is happening in them, no? "Plain English" is also a weird term to apply here; references to specific institutions, people, and places aren't, like, some kind of "weird English," it's all part of plain English.
But I do think that the post author is correct when they identify part of the problem as "readers don't expect text to make sense and do not consider that something to solve when reading," and as such are unlikely to get either concrete or abstract meaning from a chunk of it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:03 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
I don't know if this is my 'raised by an English teacher and reading Chaucer in Middle English at 14' or my 'autistic nerd brain doesn't like people and devours books instead' or my 'sister is a lawyer' or my 'live in England and pay passing attention to the calendar of the church I attend' but uh, yeah, I know what that's about. Dickens is not particularly dense text, either. It's denser than a lot of modern (since 1980) novels, but it's not obscure.
posted by ngaiotonga at 7:05 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
I don't know if this is my 'raised by an English teacher and reading Chaucer in Middle English at 14' or my 'autistic nerd brain doesn't like people and devours books instead' or my 'sister is a lawyer' or my 'live in England and pay passing attention to the calendar of the church I attend' but uh, yeah, I know what that's about. Dickens is not particularly dense text, either. It's denser than a lot of modern (since 1980) novels, but it's not obscure.
posted by ngaiotonga at 7:05 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
I’m gonna be honest, I just found the beginning of Bleak House and tried to read the first six paragraphs and it sure is hard to read. My eyes just wanna skim across it for something that’s not descriptions of the scene and find people and plot and story. It’s not until the eight paragraph that Dickens begins talking about the court case that a glimpse at the Wikipedia page for this book tells me is a major part of the plot, and he’s actually kind of funny and entertaining. Asking me “what happened in those first paragraphs” would get a big shrug: “it was foggy in England and Dickens sure was getting paid by the word”
Also Dickens is starting to be right on the border of “English that is no longer comprehensible”, him describing “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets” really jumped out at me as a wtf moment before re-parsing “divers” as an Olde spelling of “diverse”. Are we suddenly underwater? Oh. No. This book is Olde.
I am in my early fifties and have been a reader for my entire life and this is the first time I have ever tried reading Dickens (beyond, probably, some failed attempts at *Christmas Carol*) and I would probably fail any tests based on this passage. I am very experienced at holding open spaces in my mind for an unknown noun to be filled in later, much of my reading has been SF which does this a lot, but there is nothing to fill in here. There is just an entire page of “it was very foggy in London”, over and over again.
Which, I will grant, could be seen as a masterful stroke of lulling the reader into the same dreary, half-asleep state that everyone in the court falls into as soon as they try to comprehend this interminable court case that’s introduced in the eighth paragraph but damn my brain does not want to grasp onto a single one of those preceding paragraphs because there is absolutely nothing there but fog. I could feel my eyes reflexively trying to jump ahead looking for some character, some thread of narrative, to anchor myself in, and finding nothing.
posted by egypturnash at 7:09 AM on May 13 [16 favorites]
Also Dickens is starting to be right on the border of “English that is no longer comprehensible”, him describing “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets” really jumped out at me as a wtf moment before re-parsing “divers” as an Olde spelling of “diverse”. Are we suddenly underwater? Oh. No. This book is Olde.
I am in my early fifties and have been a reader for my entire life and this is the first time I have ever tried reading Dickens (beyond, probably, some failed attempts at *Christmas Carol*) and I would probably fail any tests based on this passage. I am very experienced at holding open spaces in my mind for an unknown noun to be filled in later, much of my reading has been SF which does this a lot, but there is nothing to fill in here. There is just an entire page of “it was very foggy in London”, over and over again.
Which, I will grant, could be seen as a masterful stroke of lulling the reader into the same dreary, half-asleep state that everyone in the court falls into as soon as they try to comprehend this interminable court case that’s introduced in the eighth paragraph but damn my brain does not want to grasp onto a single one of those preceding paragraphs because there is absolutely nothing there but fog. I could feel my eyes reflexively trying to jump ahead looking for some character, some thread of narrative, to anchor myself in, and finding nothing.
posted by egypturnash at 7:09 AM on May 13 [16 favorites]
I *do* expect text to make sense and this text is *not*
posted by egypturnash at 7:09 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 7:09 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
But I wonder if some people get blocked as soon as there is some unknown or ambiguity.
I have one child that really struggled with this at various points in his early schooling and for someone like me, who will read anything in front of me with words happily, sometimes in languages I don't really speak (like if they are romantic languages I will try to puzzle it out), it was eye opening.
Anyways, he's working his way through the Dune series right now so he worked through it. The solution was not really reading instruction, at least not that I'm aware of. It was reading out loud as a family, all kinds of stories with ambiguity, and finding books he really liked and having "spa reading time" in the living room device free with snacks and soothing music and candles over the pandemic.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:11 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I have one child that really struggled with this at various points in his early schooling and for someone like me, who will read anything in front of me with words happily, sometimes in languages I don't really speak (like if they are romantic languages I will try to puzzle it out), it was eye opening.
Anyways, he's working his way through the Dune series right now so he worked through it. The solution was not really reading instruction, at least not that I'm aware of. It was reading out loud as a family, all kinds of stories with ambiguity, and finding books he really liked and having "spa reading time" in the living room device free with snacks and soothing music and candles over the pandemic.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:11 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I dunno, I read Bleak House in my early 20s, and what I didn't understand, I just looked up in real deal encyclopedias. I have always done this for any book whose context I didn't understand since I started reading pretty much everything since childhood. I learned about so many different cultures and/or places I am not from that way.
posted by Kitteh at 7:11 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 7:11 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
I also read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House (Gutenberg) before starting on the linked study, which is why, reading the study and starting into the methodology, I hit the below and and went "good god no!"
posted by postcommunism at 7:14 AM on May 13 [43 favorites]
Students read each sentence out loud and then interpreted the meaning inI am a confident reader, and have read Dickens (though not Bleak House) without much trouble. But I do not read as a single-stream cursor, closing out the meaning of each sentence as I hit the period, archiving it, and moving on to the next one. That is especially true with my just-now reading of Bleak House. That opening builds up a vibe through the combined effect of individual sentences, lively and poetic. Treat them as distinct factoids to decipher and you'll blunder through the text with mounting distress until you come out the other side, exhausted, relieved, and utterly bereft of the catty delight it offers.
their own words—a process Ericsson and Simon (220) called the “think-
aloud” or “talk-aloud” method. In this 1980 article, the writers defend this
strategy as a valid way to gather evidence on cognitive processing. In their
2014 article for Contemporary Education Psychology, C. M. Bohn-Gettler and
P. Kendeou further note how “These verbalizations can provide a measure
of the actual cognitive processes readers engage in during comprehen-
sion” (208).
posted by postcommunism at 7:14 AM on May 13 [43 favorites]
This thread feels like a gruesomer version of the “Hamlet game” (in which English majors compete to name the most important work they haven’t read). The novel it’s in was thought very cynical in its day, but it doesn’t imagine that we would deep six the value of reading Dickens in defense of — Pearson, mostly, as I understand it; political forces we usually reprehend, certainly.
posted by clew at 7:17 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
posted by clew at 7:17 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
No but those of us who can read skillfully can make reasonable inferences about them based on the rest of the information in those paragraphs. Maybe the fully unchurchy among us, we never get exactly at what "Michelmas" refers to, but we work out in general what is happening and what the Lord Chancellor is doing.
I recently read another article on the reading abilities of college students (because it quoted my old Lit professor, so it caught my eye) that mentioned students simply are no longer asked to read very much, or for very long, at any point in their school careers, and that also comes to mind here.
So I popped open Bleak House, which I haven't read since freshman year of college (a course called The Victorian Novel). The first thing I twig to is, oh right, this is written notes-style, like a diary or a journal. That's a specific stylistic choice i recognize from having read and been taught fifty other such pieces. But if kids haven't read those other things, excerpts from Pepys or maybe Dracula, they won't recognize that style as impressionistic, painting a scene, and all of these sentences/sentence fragments as painting a picture of a time and place.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:18 AM on May 13 [22 favorites]
No but those of us who can read skillfully can make reasonable inferences about them based on the rest of the information in those paragraphs. Maybe the fully unchurchy among us, we never get exactly at what "Michelmas" refers to, but we work out in general what is happening and what the Lord Chancellor is doing.
I recently read another article on the reading abilities of college students (because it quoted my old Lit professor, so it caught my eye) that mentioned students simply are no longer asked to read very much, or for very long, at any point in their school careers, and that also comes to mind here.
So I popped open Bleak House, which I haven't read since freshman year of college (a course called The Victorian Novel). The first thing I twig to is, oh right, this is written notes-style, like a diary or a journal. That's a specific stylistic choice i recognize from having read and been taught fifty other such pieces. But if kids haven't read those other things, excerpts from Pepys or maybe Dracula, they won't recognize that style as impressionistic, painting a scene, and all of these sentences/sentence fragments as painting a picture of a time and place.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:18 AM on May 13 [22 favorites]
> But isn't part of successful reading being able to file away those mysterious things until you get to the next paragraph, where it then becomes clear?
That's what I would think. The ability to use mental placeholders for things while seeing if more information is going to be provided. Sort of like linguistic algebra. "Solve this text for a value of 'Michaelmas'"
Seriously. "Can't read" is a clickbait, unwarranted conclusion in my opinion.
And I say this even though I'm often shocked by people's bad reading comprehension. I read the tumblr article first and was all despairing of humanity. But I don't feel the study backs that up.
For those of you despairing without reading the study - read it.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the text participants were given:
And I mean, that would be my summary of it. Even though I do understand the details. Unless I was specifically instructed to render as complete a translation into 21st century English as possible, and to talk about the purpose of the metaphors and so on, I would say that this was a mood-setting introduction and the mood was "a damp, drizzly November in [the] soul", as another author put it. Ishmael takes himself to sea, and Dickens takes us on a little London tour. Why? Ask me after I've read the rest of the chapter.
The study says:
Only when you get to the fourth paragraph do you get your first hint that actually that wasn't just a random scene-setting detail, meaningful to contemporary audiences but skippable by you:
Next paragraph:
Should a student really have to be able to explain, on a first, cursory reading, that "this literal
fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion, disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery" in order to count as someone who knows how to read?
Skimming, and knowing when to skim, is an important skill. People who don't know how to do that and get stuck and give up when encountering something they don't 100% understand - those are people who lack reading skills. Knowing how to hold on to a scaffold of information and fill that in as more information is provided - or upon repeated readings - is at least as vital a skill as being able to catch everything the first time through.
Sometimes skimming is the right thing to do. Or at least a valid approach.
On preview: I'm glad so many people think likewise and aren't just accepting the "oh no everyone's illiterate" framing without question.
posted by trig at 7:21 AM on May 13 [46 favorites]
That's what I would think. The ability to use mental placeholders for things while seeing if more information is going to be provided. Sort of like linguistic algebra. "Solve this text for a value of 'Michaelmas'"
Seriously. "Can't read" is a clickbait, unwarranted conclusion in my opinion.
And I say this even though I'm often shocked by people's bad reading comprehension. I read the tumblr article first and was all despairing of humanity. But I don't feel the study backs that up.
For those of you despairing without reading the study - read it.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the text participants were given:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.The study seems to knock respondents for not extracting too much meaning beyond 'it was London, it was cold and muddy and wet and dark and there were lots of people' (my wording). Even though these are introductory paragraphs whose job is to set a scene, and which don't seem to be putting forth any particular information of note.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
And I mean, that would be my summary of it. Even though I do understand the details. Unless I was specifically instructed to render as complete a translation into 21st century English as possible, and to talk about the purpose of the metaphors and so on, I would say that this was a mood-setting introduction and the mood was "a damp, drizzly November in [the] soul", as another author put it. Ishmael takes himself to sea, and Dickens takes us on a little London tour. Why? Ask me after I've read the rest of the chapter.
The study says:
The subjects’ understanding of the setting thus remained vague,To me, it is problematic that the respondent didn't seem able to understand much more after 16 seconds of thinking about it, with internet access no less. Agreed. But at what point in any of these paragraphs should the reader have gotten the sense that spending time learning about the habits of the Lord Chancellor is important? Why is it not considered a valid and competent reading strategy to not get mired down in the details and instead just vaguely retain the information that Michaelmas is around the end of the year, and "Michaelmas term" may or may not be a thing, and in 19th century London there existed some role of Lord Chancellor and some place known as Lincoln’s Inn Hall, and possibly there was some connection between them?
and they were not able to interpret most of the concrete legal details in the
text. A typical case will stand for the rest:Original Text: LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the
Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Subject: And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor”
is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would
go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like
a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The
student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K.,
so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so,
Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers,
I’m just gonna skip that.]
Only when you get to the fourth paragraph do you get your first hint that actually that wasn't just a random scene-setting detail, meaningful to contemporary audiences but skippable by you:
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.Okay, now you can start paying attention a little more, and slightly filling in the skeletal information you extracted before to start building up a scaffold.
Next paragraph:
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.Should you be able to explain this off the bat? Wouldn't a better test of reading comprehension be to give these paragraphs to the reader after they've read the novel - after they've been given more than enough information to understand Dicken's attitude towards the Court of Chancery, and why he held it, and what it is in the first place?
Should a student really have to be able to explain, on a first, cursory reading, that "this literal
fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion, disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery" in order to count as someone who knows how to read?
Skimming, and knowing when to skim, is an important skill. People who don't know how to do that and get stuck and give up when encountering something they don't 100% understand - those are people who lack reading skills. Knowing how to hold on to a scaffold of information and fill that in as more information is provided - or upon repeated readings - is at least as vital a skill as being able to catch everything the first time through.
Sometimes skimming is the right thing to do. Or at least a valid approach.
On preview: I'm glad so many people think likewise and aren't just accepting the "oh no everyone's illiterate" framing without question.
posted by trig at 7:21 AM on May 13 [46 favorites]
The method of this study is bonkers. Unfamiliar texts accumulate meaning at the pace of dozens to hundreds of pages sometimes.
Unless someone already knows some Russian, have them give A Clockwork Orange a try without a glossary. Hell, I didn't even know the slang was Russian-based until years after I'd first read it in high school. For fun.
Then have them try Trainspotting. An engaged reader would absolutely eat shit on this study's methodology, but learn a lot of Scots, Scottish slang, and Nadsat by the time they're through.
posted by tclark at 7:21 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
Unless someone already knows some Russian, have them give A Clockwork Orange a try without a glossary. Hell, I didn't even know the slang was Russian-based until years after I'd first read it in high school. For fun.
Then have them try Trainspotting. An engaged reader would absolutely eat shit on this study's methodology, but learn a lot of Scots, Scottish slang, and Nadsat by the time they're through.
posted by tclark at 7:21 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
There will be some who are familiar with Michaelmas, if they're from the relevant part of the world. As for "Lincoln's Inn Hall", I figured it must be somewhere adjacent to Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, which suggested it had something to do with the various professional buildings around Holborn... which it does. But did I know that from my accumulated store of references or from having visited that exact spot in London last summer?
Ask me about a book with references to the midwestern US of the nineteenth century, though, and I might not fare so well. The points others are making here about cultural references are good ones. The thing is that learning how to interpret and understand a text and picking up cultural references so often go hand in hand.
Anyway, it was an interesting paper (I've read it now), and I'd echo mittens' comment about the Dickens passage being straightforward enough once you get past the first line. I don't know if I'd have thought so when I was in my late teens, but I suspect I would have. Most of my reading of books as a kid was for myself, not through school; it wasn't until high school that they had us reading novels that were almost as long as the ones I'd been reading in primary school. But I was a weird kid in that respect, even forty years ago, as probably quite a few of us here were.
I've managed to raise two weird kids in turn, at least. Spending ten years reading to each of them and lining their bedroom walls with kids' books did the trick. The youngest (not yet 14) is currently enjoying Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, having got there via (a) an obsession with Hamilton and (b) an obsession with Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, which led us to watch the 2012 film of Les Mis, which led to the novel. It's an older translation, too; they sampled a newer one when we were comparing them in the bookstore, and didn't like it as much. Seems a good sign.
I can't imagine wanting to do an English degree, or to study to teach English, without having that obsessive love of reading. That's what I found so eye-opening about the paper and the Tumblr post.
Thanks for sharing them, signal.
posted by rory at 7:22 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
There will be some who are familiar with Michaelmas, if they're from the relevant part of the world. As for "Lincoln's Inn Hall", I figured it must be somewhere adjacent to Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, which suggested it had something to do with the various professional buildings around Holborn... which it does. But did I know that from my accumulated store of references or from having visited that exact spot in London last summer?
Ask me about a book with references to the midwestern US of the nineteenth century, though, and I might not fare so well. The points others are making here about cultural references are good ones. The thing is that learning how to interpret and understand a text and picking up cultural references so often go hand in hand.
Anyway, it was an interesting paper (I've read it now), and I'd echo mittens' comment about the Dickens passage being straightforward enough once you get past the first line. I don't know if I'd have thought so when I was in my late teens, but I suspect I would have. Most of my reading of books as a kid was for myself, not through school; it wasn't until high school that they had us reading novels that were almost as long as the ones I'd been reading in primary school. But I was a weird kid in that respect, even forty years ago, as probably quite a few of us here were.
I've managed to raise two weird kids in turn, at least. Spending ten years reading to each of them and lining their bedroom walls with kids' books did the trick. The youngest (not yet 14) is currently enjoying Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, having got there via (a) an obsession with Hamilton and (b) an obsession with Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, which led us to watch the 2012 film of Les Mis, which led to the novel. It's an older translation, too; they sampled a newer one when we were comparing them in the bookstore, and didn't like it as much. Seems a good sign.
I can't imagine wanting to do an English degree, or to study to teach English, without having that obsessive love of reading. That's what I found so eye-opening about the paper and the Tumblr post.
Thanks for sharing them, signal.
posted by rory at 7:22 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
anyway I declare this to be my entry in MeFi's first annual Summarize Dickens competition:
¶ 1. It is November in London and it is muddy.
¶ 2. It is foggy.
¶ 3. Very foggy. So foggy you feel like you're swimming through it? Oh wait no that's not what he means by mentioning "divers".
¶ 4. Very foggy indeed, next to a bar. Or a court. Or something.
¶ 5. Pretty sure it's a court now. Full of assholes.
¶ 6. We are definitely in a court. It sucks to be here and it should normally be full of people but now it is empty.
¶ 7. It is empty because a very tedious case is being heard.
¶ 8. Dickens wakes you back up by cracking some jokes about how immensely prolonged and labyrinthine this case is. But the students taking this test never got to read this part. All they got was a page full of fog.
posted by egypturnash at 7:26 AM on May 13 [28 favorites]
¶ 1. It is November in London and it is muddy.
¶ 2. It is foggy.
¶ 3. Very foggy. So foggy you feel like you're swimming through it? Oh wait no that's not what he means by mentioning "divers".
¶ 4. Very foggy indeed, next to a bar. Or a court. Or something.
¶ 5. Pretty sure it's a court now. Full of assholes.
¶ 6. We are definitely in a court. It sucks to be here and it should normally be full of people but now it is empty.
¶ 7. It is empty because a very tedious case is being heard.
¶ 8. Dickens wakes you back up by cracking some jokes about how immensely prolonged and labyrinthine this case is. But the students taking this test never got to read this part. All they got was a page full of fog.
posted by egypturnash at 7:26 AM on May 13 [28 favorites]
> No but those of us who can read skillfully can make reasonable inferences about them based on the rest of the information in those paragraphs. Maybe the fully unchurchy among us, we never get exactly at what "Michelmas" refers to, but we work out in general what is happening and what the Lord Chancellor is doing.
Exactly this. It may be a skill you need to learn, but part of reading works which are older or in an unfamiliar genre is to just go for it and assemble the meaning from the larger context. You may need to re-read or research, sure. But, if I read the below:
(I assume it's a skylight. I didn't bother to look it up, because I don't need to to understand the full paragraph.)
posted by postcommunism at 7:29 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Exactly this. It may be a skill you need to learn, but part of reading works which are older or in an unfamiliar genre is to just go for it and assemble the meaning from the larger context. You may need to re-read or research, sure. But, if I read the below:
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.and I'm not sure exactly what "lantern" is in this context, as was the case just now. I read on. If I were under time pressure and had a tester stop me and grill me on exactly what the sentence meant, I could very well get hung up on that one word and just spiral from there.
(I assume it's a skylight. I didn't bother to look it up, because I don't need to to understand the full paragraph.)
posted by postcommunism at 7:29 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
The Bleak House opening would translate very easily to film or graphic novels. Even the counter factuals are mostly sensuous… probably no BBC dramatization managed to slip in a Megalosaurus but I can hope.
posted by clew at 7:29 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
posted by clew at 7:29 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
¶ 1. It is November in London and it is muddy.
¶ 2. It is foggy.
¶ 3. Very foggy. So foggy you feel like you're swimming through it? Oh wait no that's not what he means by mentioning "divers".
¶ 4. Very foggy indeed, next to a bar. Or a court. Or something.
¶ 5. Pretty sure it's a court now. Full of assholes.
Guess you don't know how to read! What is society coming to. (Opinions are the study's and not my own.)
posted by trig at 7:30 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Some interesting observations here, but the [Tumblr] author’s stubborn refusal to capitalize even where it’s necessary for clarity about what they’re saying, or to edit with any care generally, is really off-putting in this context.It seems reasonable that the proportion of English majors that can’t write would exceed the number that can’t read…
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 7:32 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
This reminds me of my senior honors English class soldiering grimly through a cold reading of an excerpt of Dickens as a group exercise. It introduced a family of characters. The man's face was red, the baby was fat, they all seemed kind of awful, we were not inspired.
Our teacher finally burst out with the critical thing we were all missing: it's funny!. That miserable passage had been written to be comic.
Y'all, it was not funny.
Come to think, that was almost certainly the last time I read Dickens, he is pretty avoidable even in a college English department. I don't know that I'd have done better than the students with the multiple fog paragraphs. 'London was foggy and miserable and Dickens goes on about it like he got paid by the word.'
posted by mersen at 7:32 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Our teacher finally burst out with the critical thing we were all missing: it's funny!. That miserable passage had been written to be comic.
Y'all, it was not funny.
Come to think, that was almost certainly the last time I read Dickens, he is pretty avoidable even in a college English department. I don't know that I'd have done better than the students with the multiple fog paragraphs. 'London was foggy and miserable and Dickens goes on about it like he got paid by the word.'
posted by mersen at 7:32 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I'd like to see this done with some contemporary writer like Tom Clancy, who fills his books with military jargon and nonsense. What you don't know what an M16A2 is? You fool!
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
There's a pretty big difference between not being able to read in general and not being able to parse some particularly dense descriptive prose from Dickens that requires historical context.
Agreed; there's a whole thread in the Tumblr comments about the state of scientific and popular knowledge of dinosaurs at the time Dickens was writing, and how much clearer the dinosaur image and its function is if you think like an 1850s British person. As someone who reads primary medical literature and academic philosophy for fun but also found the paragraph reprinted in the paper a slog, I think translating struggling with this particular task into "can't read" is an overstatement. (I have no inclination to even attempt the next six paragraphs right now)
And yet...
These were mostly upper-level undergraduates reading in what is supposed to be their field of specialization.
And not being able to glean basic facts like "we're in some kind of court or legal proceeding" by the end of the passage (as described) does seem problematic. I would consider a minimal criterion for "being able to read" a novel to be decoding the plot, characters, and setting: what happened to whom, or who did what, in this story? Maybe it would have become clearer to them as they kept going and gathered even more information, but I can see how these students don't look like they're positioned for success with this book. It might be fair to say that these students can't read Dickens. It might even be fair to say reading Dickens is something a person with an English degree should be able to do (even if it's not the most important thing they do), but I'll leave that decision to people in other lanes than mine.
Fundamentally, what I find illuminating about the paper and blog post, taken together, is the picture they paint of what is going on cognitively when someone is reading but not understanding (much) and how students are advancing through school even when that's where they are with the material. Reading the words but not understanding what's going on is an experience we've all personally had, I imagine, but I for one don't like it and usually try to stop having it asap by either putting down the reading or intensively puzzling out the meaning. I've had a hard time fathoming how it's even possible to go through years and years of education with reading skills consistently below the level of the texts you're being given. And I feel like I get it better now.
posted by actuallyquite at 7:33 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
Agreed; there's a whole thread in the Tumblr comments about the state of scientific and popular knowledge of dinosaurs at the time Dickens was writing, and how much clearer the dinosaur image and its function is if you think like an 1850s British person. As someone who reads primary medical literature and academic philosophy for fun but also found the paragraph reprinted in the paper a slog, I think translating struggling with this particular task into "can't read" is an overstatement. (I have no inclination to even attempt the next six paragraphs right now)
And yet...
These were mostly upper-level undergraduates reading in what is supposed to be their field of specialization.
And not being able to glean basic facts like "we're in some kind of court or legal proceeding" by the end of the passage (as described) does seem problematic. I would consider a minimal criterion for "being able to read" a novel to be decoding the plot, characters, and setting: what happened to whom, or who did what, in this story? Maybe it would have become clearer to them as they kept going and gathered even more information, but I can see how these students don't look like they're positioned for success with this book. It might be fair to say that these students can't read Dickens. It might even be fair to say reading Dickens is something a person with an English degree should be able to do (even if it's not the most important thing they do), but I'll leave that decision to people in other lanes than mine.
Fundamentally, what I find illuminating about the paper and blog post, taken together, is the picture they paint of what is going on cognitively when someone is reading but not understanding (much) and how students are advancing through school even when that's where they are with the material. Reading the words but not understanding what's going on is an experience we've all personally had, I imagine, but I for one don't like it and usually try to stop having it asap by either putting down the reading or intensively puzzling out the meaning. I've had a hard time fathoming how it's even possible to go through years and years of education with reading skills consistently below the level of the texts you're being given. And I feel like I get it better now.
posted by actuallyquite at 7:33 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
They are English majors who were allowed to look up anything they like on the Internet, pre-COVID, pre-ChatGPT. Not knowing what something means shouldn't be a problem.
I think toodleydoodley is likely correct about this being partly a "teaching to the test" problem. You can't look things up in a test, so they've been taught or worked out that if you don't understand a term, you just guess and keep going.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:34 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
I think toodleydoodley is likely correct about this being partly a "teaching to the test" problem. You can't look things up in a test, so they've been taught or worked out that if you don't understand a term, you just guess and keep going.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:34 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
Also Dickens is starting to be right on the border of “English that is no longer comprehensible”
Yes, the archaic usage that struck me in the first paragraph was "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus", where a modern writer would say "it would not be surprising to meet a Megalosaurus". And I could get that from context, but I could see a lot of people thinking, "Of course it wouldn't be wonderful to meet one! It would be disastrous!"
posted by Daily Alice at 7:36 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Yes, the archaic usage that struck me in the first paragraph was "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus", where a modern writer would say "it would not be surprising to meet a Megalosaurus". And I could get that from context, but I could see a lot of people thinking, "Of course it wouldn't be wonderful to meet one! It would be disastrous!"
posted by Daily Alice at 7:36 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Yes, it would be surprising to be familiar with the court of chancery (unless you're into delaware's favorable business climate) or the inns of the court. But they were allowed to use their phones to look things up. I have a distinct memory of reading as a kid Dickens and writing down what I was confused about, then going to the Encyclopedia Brittanica in our house and looking these things up. Then getting lost in the macropedia for a while. Then eventually going back to Dickens armed with knowledge. Somehow the easier it is to access knowledge about anything at any moment the less people want to know
posted by dis_integration at 7:37 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 7:37 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
For those of you despairing without reading the study - read it.
I read the study and still despaired. An English major who reads "a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" and concludes that there is a cat in the room is not someone who "knows when to skim" and can come back at the end of the novel and explain what's happening. It's someone who has made a very serious error, seemingly based off an only slightly old fashioned meaning of the word whiskers, and hasn't understood what they've read.
The same with the person who thinks a Megolasaurus is "some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets." It's so muddy that it looks like the Biblical Flood just receded and you could see a dinosaur walking down the street isn't something you need to read along and come back to, you can get that immediately without any kind of obscure knowledge. It's a funny image, and one I'd hope someone who specializes in reading English literature would get at first glance.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:37 AM on May 13 [23 favorites]
I read the study and still despaired. An English major who reads "a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" and concludes that there is a cat in the room is not someone who "knows when to skim" and can come back at the end of the novel and explain what's happening. It's someone who has made a very serious error, seemingly based off an only slightly old fashioned meaning of the word whiskers, and hasn't understood what they've read.
The same with the person who thinks a Megolasaurus is "some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets." It's so muddy that it looks like the Biblical Flood just receded and you could see a dinosaur walking down the street isn't something you need to read along and come back to, you can get that immediately without any kind of obscure knowledge. It's a funny image, and one I'd hope someone who specializes in reading English literature would get at first glance.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:37 AM on May 13 [23 favorites]
I think the problem was likely more that they were asked to read it aloud and interrupted and asked to explain the meaning verbally every few sentences. That's a nonsensical way to read a text like this.
posted by ssg at 7:38 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
posted by ssg at 7:38 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
You can't look things up in a test, so they've been taught or worked out that if you don't understand a term, you just guess and keep going.
As someone who learned how to read before the web - that's exactly what you do, unless you recognize that spending time right then and there to look up the meaning of some specific term or decipher some paragraph is critical to understanding.
Which is often the case in non-fiction, but rarely so when reading novels.
posted by trig at 7:39 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
As someone who learned how to read before the web - that's exactly what you do, unless you recognize that spending time right then and there to look up the meaning of some specific term or decipher some paragraph is critical to understanding.
Which is often the case in non-fiction, but rarely so when reading novels.
posted by trig at 7:39 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
I am reminded of Jerome K. Jerome's account of a school class in "Three Men on the Bummel" though.
As regards the question, there also lingers in my memory very distinctly a hot school afternoon. The class was for English literature, and the proceedings commenced with the reading of a certain lengthy, but otherwise unobjectionable, poem. The author’s name, I am ashamed to say, I have forgotten, together with the title of the poem. The reading finished, we closed our books, and the Professor, a kindly, white-haired old gentleman, suggested our giving in our own words an account of what we had just read.posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:42 AM on May 13 [33 favorites]
“Tell me,” said the Professor, encouragingly, “what it is all about.”
“Please, sir,” said the first boy—he spoke with bowed head and evident reluctance, as though the subject were one which, left to himself, he would never have mentioned,—“it is about a maiden.”
“Yes,” agreed the Professor; “but I want you to tell me in your own words. We do not speak of a maiden, you know; we say a girl. Yes, it is about a girl. Go on.”
“A girl,” repeated the top boy, the substitution apparently increasing his embarrassment, “who lived in a wood.”
“What sort of a wood?” asked the Professor.
The first boy examined his inkpot carefully, and then looked at the ceiling.
“Come,” urged the Professor, growing impatient, “you have been reading about this wood for the last ten minutes. Surely you can tell me something concerning it.”
“The gnarly trees, their twisted branches”—recommenced the top boy.
“No, no,” interrupted the Professor; “I do not want you to repeat the poem. I want you to tell me in your own words what sort of a wood it was where the girl lived.”
The Professor tapped his foot impatiently; the top boy made a dash for it.
“Please, sir, it was the usual sort of a wood.”
“Tell him what sort of a wood,” said he, pointing to the second lad.
The second boy said it was a “green wood.” This annoyed the Professor still more; he called the second boy a blockhead, though really I cannot see why, and passed on to the third, who, for the last minute, had been sitting apparently on hot plates, with his right arm waving up and down like a distracted semaphore signal. He would have had to say it the next second, whether the Professor had asked him or not; he was red in the face, holding his knowledge in.
“A dark and gloomy wood,” shouted the third boy, with much relief to his feelings.
“A dark and gloomy wood,” repeated the Professor, with evident approval. “And why was it dark and gloomy?”
The third boy was still equal to the occasion.
“Because the sun could not get inside it.”
The Professor felt he had discovered the poet of the class.
“Because the sun could not get into it, or, better, because the sunbeams could not penetrate. And why could not the sunbeams penetrate there?”
“Please, sir, because the leaves were too thick.”
“Very well,” said the Professor. “The girl lived in a dark and gloomy wood, through the leafy canopy of which the sunbeams were unable to pierce. Now, what grew in this wood?” He pointed to the fourth boy.
“Please, sir, trees, sir.”
“And what else?”
“Toadstools, sir.” This after a pause.
The Professor was not quite sure about the toadstools, but on referring to the text he found that the boy was right; toadstools had been mentioned.
“Quite right,” admitted the Professor, “toadstools grew there. And what else? What do you find underneath trees in a wood?”
“Please, sir, earth, sir.”
“No; no; what grows in a wood besides trees?”
“Oh, please, sir, bushes, sir.”
“Bushes; very good. Now we are getting on. In this wood there were trees and bushes. And what else?”
He pointed to a small boy near the bottom, who having decided that the wood was too far off to be of any annoyance to him, individually, was occupying his leisure playing noughts and crosses against himself. Vexed and bewildered, but feeling it necessary to add something to the inventory, he hazarded blackberries. This was a mistake; the poet had not mentioned blackberries.
“Of course, Klobstock would think of something to eat,” commented the Professor, who prided himself on his ready wit. This raised a laugh against Klobstock, and pleased the Professor.
“You,” continued he, pointing to a boy in the middle; “what else was there in this wood besides trees and bushes?”
“Please, sir, there was a torrent there.”
“Quite right; and what did the torrent do?”
“Please, sir, it gurgled.”
“No; no. Streams gurgle, torrents—?”
“Roar, sir.”
“It roared. And what made it roar?”
This was a poser. One boy—he was not our prize intellect, I admit—suggested the girl. To help us the Professor put his question in another form:
“When did it roar?”
Our third boy, again coming to the rescue, explained that it roared when it fell down among the rocks. I think some of us had a vague idea that it must have been a cowardly torrent to make such a noise about a little thing like this; a pluckier torrent, we felt, would have got up and gone on, saying nothing about it. A torrent that roared every time it fell upon a rock we deemed a poor spirited torrent; but the Professor seemed quite content with it.
“And what lived in this wood beside the girl?” was the next question.
“Please, sir, birds, sir.”
“Yes, birds lived in this wood. What else?”
Birds seemed to have exhausted our ideas.
“Come,” said the Professor, “what are those animals with tails, that run up trees?”
We thought for a while, then one of us suggested cats.
This was an error; the poet had said nothing about cats; squirrels was what the Professor was trying to get.
I do not recall much more about this wood in detail. I only recollect that the sky was introduced into it. In places where there occurred an opening among the trees you could by looking up see the sky above you; very often there were clouds in this sky, and occasionally, if I remember rightly, the girl got wet.
I have dwelt upon this incident, because it seems to me suggestive of the whole question of scenery in literature. I could not at the time, I cannot now, understand why the top boy’s summary was not sufficient. With all due deference to the poet, whoever he may have been, one cannot but acknowledge that his wood was, and could not be otherwise than, “the usual sort of a wood.”
I can't imagine wanting to do an English degree, or to study to teach English, without having that obsessive love of reading. That's what I found so eye-opening about the paper and the Tumblr post.
More than twenty years ago, in my early 30s, I went back to college to get the English major I hadn't been allowed/brave enough to do in my early 20s. I told none of my profs or classmates that I already had a BA, let alone an MA and an MFA. I was a total ringer.
I learned a lot and had a great time. Though some of the profs weren't great, some of the best classes I ever took were at this little directional state university in Michigan: a senior seminar on Thoreau; a team-taught class on African film and literature, and literature about Africa by non-Africans; an amazing grammar class that was nothing but a semester of making increasingly complicated tree diagrams of sentences.
One thing that was striking and demoralizing was that I didn't encounter one other student who was really enthusiastic about English literature. Many of the other students in my classes were going into education; quite a few of them were aiming to be coaches, and their academic major seemed very secondary to that goal. I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd spent a lot of time in college and knew that many students weren't especially engaged, but on the other hand, one of my two undergrad majors had been Women's Studies, and the WS majors were fricking passionate.
I agree with critics that this study would be more useful if students were faced with a variety of texts. 19th century lit can be very challenging, and faced with Michaelmas and Lincoln's Inn, students may have found themselves suffering a kind of immediate shock that made it difficult to parse the text as well as they might have. I myself read 19th C lit for a long time, with great enjoyment, without fully understanding what "Lincoln's Inn" was. I've read a lot of lit set at English colleges without fully understanding the system of naming terms. I just know: if it's a term, they're in classes. If it's a break, they're not. I am also aware that the system of lectures and tutorials is very different from the model in the United States, and I am content, in general, with a very rough idea of what that looks like.
I might also question encouraging them to look up things they didn't understand. Reading that is full of stops and starts isn't as likely to convey a coherent narrative. I might try this experiment on another group of students who are told to simply read the passage from beginning to end, perhaps re-reading it if necessary, and not to get hung up on individual words or phrases they don't understand. The 19th century American lit class I took at Directional State changed my life in part because the prof assigned "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman's very long and difficult poem. She told us that the way to get through it was to read it without stopping, even if we didn't understand what was going on. I went home and did that, and found pieces of the poem that really spoke to me, that I loved, that were magical. What I loved about "Song of Myself" I loved so that I offered a workshop on the poem at a major Quaker gathering I attend most years. That was 1999, and the last time I led that workshop was 2024, though I don't lead it every year. I'd always loved Whitman, but struggled with his longer works, and now I am literally a Walt Whitman scholar working on a project involving queerness and Quakerism.
I have used that "just read it" method several times since then to get through challenging works. James Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, which I understood better and enjoyed more the second time through, and which I would never have understood or enjoyed very much without that permission to read without worrying about reading perfectly.
So, while I'm not going to argue too much against the basic premise that reading skills are not what they should be among English majors, I would love to see this study repeated with different texts, and with different strategies being suggested to students. There are certainly other variations that could provide additional insight. This study feels a bit like they set out to prove that English majors can't read effectively, and designed it with that in mind.
posted by Well I never at 7:45 AM on May 13 [24 favorites]
More than twenty years ago, in my early 30s, I went back to college to get the English major I hadn't been allowed/brave enough to do in my early 20s. I told none of my profs or classmates that I already had a BA, let alone an MA and an MFA. I was a total ringer.
I learned a lot and had a great time. Though some of the profs weren't great, some of the best classes I ever took were at this little directional state university in Michigan: a senior seminar on Thoreau; a team-taught class on African film and literature, and literature about Africa by non-Africans; an amazing grammar class that was nothing but a semester of making increasingly complicated tree diagrams of sentences.
One thing that was striking and demoralizing was that I didn't encounter one other student who was really enthusiastic about English literature. Many of the other students in my classes were going into education; quite a few of them were aiming to be coaches, and their academic major seemed very secondary to that goal. I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd spent a lot of time in college and knew that many students weren't especially engaged, but on the other hand, one of my two undergrad majors had been Women's Studies, and the WS majors were fricking passionate.
I agree with critics that this study would be more useful if students were faced with a variety of texts. 19th century lit can be very challenging, and faced with Michaelmas and Lincoln's Inn, students may have found themselves suffering a kind of immediate shock that made it difficult to parse the text as well as they might have. I myself read 19th C lit for a long time, with great enjoyment, without fully understanding what "Lincoln's Inn" was. I've read a lot of lit set at English colleges without fully understanding the system of naming terms. I just know: if it's a term, they're in classes. If it's a break, they're not. I am also aware that the system of lectures and tutorials is very different from the model in the United States, and I am content, in general, with a very rough idea of what that looks like.
I might also question encouraging them to look up things they didn't understand. Reading that is full of stops and starts isn't as likely to convey a coherent narrative. I might try this experiment on another group of students who are told to simply read the passage from beginning to end, perhaps re-reading it if necessary, and not to get hung up on individual words or phrases they don't understand. The 19th century American lit class I took at Directional State changed my life in part because the prof assigned "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman's very long and difficult poem. She told us that the way to get through it was to read it without stopping, even if we didn't understand what was going on. I went home and did that, and found pieces of the poem that really spoke to me, that I loved, that were magical. What I loved about "Song of Myself" I loved so that I offered a workshop on the poem at a major Quaker gathering I attend most years. That was 1999, and the last time I led that workshop was 2024, though I don't lead it every year. I'd always loved Whitman, but struggled with his longer works, and now I am literally a Walt Whitman scholar working on a project involving queerness and Quakerism.
I have used that "just read it" method several times since then to get through challenging works. James Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, which I understood better and enjoyed more the second time through, and which I would never have understood or enjoyed very much without that permission to read without worrying about reading perfectly.
So, while I'm not going to argue too much against the basic premise that reading skills are not what they should be among English majors, I would love to see this study repeated with different texts, and with different strategies being suggested to students. There are certainly other variations that could provide additional insight. This study feels a bit like they set out to prove that English majors can't read effectively, and designed it with that in mind.
posted by Well I never at 7:45 AM on May 13 [24 favorites]
The study is holding English lit majors to the standards you'd expect an English lit major to meet; that is, able to do a close reading of the passage and understand meaning, context and word choice. They were allowed to consult reference works or the internet to look up things they don't understand.
There were detailed questions they couldn't answer that could have clued them in to look up further items. For example, the study says that of course people might not know what Michaelmas or Lord Chancellor means when reading the opening line. Then notes that many people didn't go back to learn more.
Lots of comments here as if the study is criticizing them personally for not doing a close reading. Look, if a casual reader dives into the selection and gets "muddy and foggy" out of it while waiting to see where an actual plot point will show up, it's fine.
But it's not the skills you need to study a text. It'd be like a chemist understanding entropy as "disorder increases" but not knowing under why there is a TΔS term when calculating Gibbs free energy.
posted by mark k at 7:45 AM on May 13 [22 favorites]
There were detailed questions they couldn't answer that could have clued them in to look up further items. For example, the study says that of course people might not know what Michaelmas or Lord Chancellor means when reading the opening line. Then notes that many people didn't go back to learn more.
Lots of comments here as if the study is criticizing them personally for not doing a close reading. Look, if a casual reader dives into the selection and gets "muddy and foggy" out of it while waiting to see where an actual plot point will show up, it's fine.
But it's not the skills you need to study a text. It'd be like a chemist understanding entropy as "disorder increases" but not knowing under why there is a TΔS term when calculating Gibbs free energy.
posted by mark k at 7:45 AM on May 13 [22 favorites]
clew > The Bleak House opening would translate very easily to film or graphic novels.
yeah, I was just coming here to say that. This is the textual equivalent of fading up from black to a bank of fog, which slowly parts to reveal muddy, nasty, dreary, grey London; as the camera glides through the streets its gaze occasionally lingers on shop signs that have the movie's stars and producers given on them, then moves decisively into the courthouse; the score's main theme begins to be stated as we drift across the nearly-empty court, noticing that a whole lot of the papers on the desks of bored-looking lawyers say JARNDYCE V JARNDYCE on them, until finally the judge's gavel crashes down on a legal brief titled BLEAK HOUSE BY CHAS. DICKENS. Show off your budget, do it as a well-choreographed one-shot.
posted by egypturnash at 7:50 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
yeah, I was just coming here to say that. This is the textual equivalent of fading up from black to a bank of fog, which slowly parts to reveal muddy, nasty, dreary, grey London; as the camera glides through the streets its gaze occasionally lingers on shop signs that have the movie's stars and producers given on them, then moves decisively into the courthouse; the score's main theme begins to be stated as we drift across the nearly-empty court, noticing that a whole lot of the papers on the desks of bored-looking lawyers say JARNDYCE V JARNDYCE on them, until finally the judge's gavel crashes down on a legal brief titled BLEAK HOUSE BY CHAS. DICKENS. Show off your budget, do it as a well-choreographed one-shot.
posted by egypturnash at 7:50 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
It's so muddy that it looks like the Biblical Flood just receded and you could see a dinosaur walking down the street isn't something you need to read along and come back to, you can get that immediately without any kind of obscure knowledge.
You're assuming a level of knowledge of the bible that many people simply don't have. In 1852, whether or not dinosaurs were on the Ark would have been something people would have connected easily to the passage, but now perhaps not so much.
posted by ssg at 7:52 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
You're assuming a level of knowledge of the bible that many people simply don't have. In 1852, whether or not dinosaurs were on the Ark would have been something people would have connected easily to the passage, but now perhaps not so much.
posted by ssg at 7:52 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
You're assuming a level of knowledge of the bible that many people simply don't have. In 1852, whether or not dinosaurs were on the Ark would have been something people would have connected easily to the passage, but now perhaps not so much.
I would argue that you don't need the biblical understanding of the 1850s to see that Dickens is referencing an ancient time (or, alternately, a timeless kind of muck); "the waters newly receded from the Earth" could be any waters. I argue this because I have no idea what people in the 1850s thought about dinosaurs and the Ark, but understood this sentence just fine.
But again what I do have is not specific cultural background knowledge but familiarity with reading and literature overall, such that I know the kinds of things authors do and why and how they do them! Which I think is as much what these English majors lack as any specific comprehension skill.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:58 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I would argue that you don't need the biblical understanding of the 1850s to see that Dickens is referencing an ancient time (or, alternately, a timeless kind of muck); "the waters newly receded from the Earth" could be any waters. I argue this because I have no idea what people in the 1850s thought about dinosaurs and the Ark, but understood this sentence just fine.
But again what I do have is not specific cultural background knowledge but familiarity with reading and literature overall, such that I know the kinds of things authors do and why and how they do them! Which I think is as much what these English majors lack as any specific comprehension skill.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:58 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Look, if a casual reader dives into the selection and gets "muddy and foggy" out of it while waiting to see where an actual plot point will show up, it's fine.
But it's not the skills you need to study a text.
That's the thing though. Those might not be the skills to deeply study a text, but they are indeed the skills to read it casually, the way even most "good readers" would approach most books they read for pleasure. The comment earlier in the thread that said this is the kind of intro that you're supposed to bathe in, not necessarily do a clinical reading of, is right.
Were these participants instructed to behave as they would if they were doing a close, analytical study of the text? Were they told to spell out the logic of every metaphor and define every cultural reference, otherwise they'd be classified as not knowing how to read? The paper only says "facilitators were there to record how subjects were understanding the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an interpretation."
Again, I think there are problems with literacy overall and am often amazed by how far from fluent many readers are with older writing and all the cultural references therein. But this study presents reading as one specific kind of process, while I strongly believe it can - and usually does - take the form of a number of legitimate processes, all of which have value in different contexts.
I think the methodology and the specific text the study authors used were not well chosen to illustrate their point.
posted by trig at 8:03 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
But it's not the skills you need to study a text.
That's the thing though. Those might not be the skills to deeply study a text, but they are indeed the skills to read it casually, the way even most "good readers" would approach most books they read for pleasure. The comment earlier in the thread that said this is the kind of intro that you're supposed to bathe in, not necessarily do a clinical reading of, is right.
Were these participants instructed to behave as they would if they were doing a close, analytical study of the text? Were they told to spell out the logic of every metaphor and define every cultural reference, otherwise they'd be classified as not knowing how to read? The paper only says "facilitators were there to record how subjects were understanding the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an interpretation."
Again, I think there are problems with literacy overall and am often amazed by how far from fluent many readers are with older writing and all the cultural references therein. But this study presents reading as one specific kind of process, while I strongly believe it can - and usually does - take the form of a number of legitimate processes, all of which have value in different contexts.
I think the methodology and the specific text the study authors used were not well chosen to illustrate their point.
posted by trig at 8:03 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Tumblr’s reaction to the Tumblr post: on the nice side i do love how many people are tagging that post to express "wait the first seven paragraphs of bleak house kind of slap?"
posted by 1970s Antihero at 8:05 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 8:05 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
Were these participants instructed to behave as they would if they were doing a close, analytical study of the text? Were they told to spell out the logic of every metaphor and define every cultural reference, otherwise they'd be classified as not knowing how to read?
They thought there were literal dinosaurs and a cat in the scene.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:06 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
They thought there were literal dinosaurs and a cat in the scene.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:06 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
You're assuming a level of knowledge of the bible that many people simply don't have.
I think I'm assuming a level of Biblical knowledge that is appropriate for an English major. If you're going to hold yourself out as especially trained in interpreting or teaching English literature, a field that is full of Biblical references, you should have a basic floor of knowledge.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:06 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
I think I'm assuming a level of Biblical knowledge that is appropriate for an English major. If you're going to hold yourself out as especially trained in interpreting or teaching English literature, a field that is full of Biblical references, you should have a basic floor of knowledge.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:06 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
They thought there were literal dinosaurs and a cat in the scene.
Some did. Did the majority?
posted by trig at 8:06 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Some did. Did the majority?
posted by trig at 8:06 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Show off your budget, do it as a well-choreographed one-shot
With a Megalodon!
posted by clew at 8:07 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
With a Megalodon!
posted by clew at 8:07 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
anyway I declare this to be my entry in MeFi's first annual Summarize Dickens competition:
paragraph1: It's that later part of fall when the leaves have all fallen and there's no color left and the world is just an endless grey drizzle until it finally starts snowing and at least everything is white for a day. Everything is soaked and sodden and the ground squelches everywhere you step and it's just miserable and awful. Everyone hates it and hates each other for getting in the way and slowing them down and forcing them to spend even one extra millisecond in the awfulness.
(you really didn't get anything more than "It's November in London and it's muddy." You didn't notice or care about any of the details Dickens was setting, the mood he was providing? It was really just "it muddy" and that's it?)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:11 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
paragraph1: It's that later part of fall when the leaves have all fallen and there's no color left and the world is just an endless grey drizzle until it finally starts snowing and at least everything is white for a day. Everything is soaked and sodden and the ground squelches everywhere you step and it's just miserable and awful. Everyone hates it and hates each other for getting in the way and slowing them down and forcing them to spend even one extra millisecond in the awfulness.
(you really didn't get anything more than "It's November in London and it's muddy." You didn't notice or care about any of the details Dickens was setting, the mood he was providing? It was really just "it muddy" and that's it?)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:11 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
One thing that I've learned - especially from reading in languages where I'm intermediate-to-advanced but not fluent - is how much readers depend on scaffolding from within the passage to hold it together. This passage from Bleak House is full of stuff that I kind of sort of know, and that's what keeps it hanging together for me. And almost all of the tough bits in the passage are things that you can think around if you have enough of the other pieces. But every bit of lexical or historical or cultural knowledge you're missing makes it just a little bit harder for that thinking-around to happen, until at some point the whole edifice just collapses and you're left without enough textual anchors to get that an advocate with whiskers is a bearded judge, rather than a cat.
I do think that if you're in the 3rd year of an English major you should be able to find enough textual anchors to work out most of this passage. But the fact that I'm able to work out this kind of stuff comes from the fact that I read an abridged Great Expectations in 9th grade, and Jane Eyre in 8th, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 12th. (I am admittedly pretty under-read in 19th c literature.)
I think students need a LOT of this kind of writing to get used to it. And they are, as far as I have gathered, reading much fewer novels in high school than they were 25 years ago. You're not going to catch up quickly if you're a first-year English major who read one or two novels in high school instead of a dozen.
(And yeah, anybody who's an English major should already have a pretty solid leisure reading habit, but even among the most bookish high school students, few are reading Dickens for fun.)
posted by Jeanne at 8:12 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I do think that if you're in the 3rd year of an English major you should be able to find enough textual anchors to work out most of this passage. But the fact that I'm able to work out this kind of stuff comes from the fact that I read an abridged Great Expectations in 9th grade, and Jane Eyre in 8th, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 12th. (I am admittedly pretty under-read in 19th c literature.)
I think students need a LOT of this kind of writing to get used to it. And they are, as far as I have gathered, reading much fewer novels in high school than they were 25 years ago. You're not going to catch up quickly if you're a first-year English major who read one or two novels in high school instead of a dozen.
(And yeah, anybody who's an English major should already have a pretty solid leisure reading habit, but even among the most bookish high school students, few are reading Dickens for fun.)
posted by Jeanne at 8:12 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I don't know - I tend to think that something is wrong when an English major struggles to parse the basic content of the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House. If an engineering student or an Asian Studies major struggles, well, it's not their field; and you wouldn't be surprised if your average high school student struggled. But I mean, you kind of need to read some difficult pre-1930 novels to be an English major - maybe you can just skip Dickens, but can you skip Melville AND James AND Woolf? And of course if you can't do Dickens, can you do Fielding or Smollett or Shakespeare or Milton?
Making this "the fault" of "bad English majors" is a mistake. Obviously something is wrong. I was in high school in the early nineties and we read two Dickens novels. We read a couple of short pieces (the beginning of David Copperfield and Dickens's own recollection of his childhood) when I was twelve or thirteen. Language has not drifted so much since 1992 that kids could read Dickens at fifteen and within twenty years college students could no longer read him. People hated Great Expectations (I hate it still and I'm a big Dickens enthusiast) but they could read it.
And the thing is Bleak House is a great novel - it's funny and extremely weird and very creepy in places and it has several powerful depictions of the kind of evil that people don't always recognize when they meet it. Great Expectations, well, I find it extremely whiny, but it is a crime to fail people so that they cannot, while basically interested in reading, read and enjoy Bleak House. Once you get going with it, it is extremely, extremely readable. It deserves the kind of revival that Moby Dick has had, because it is just as bizarre.
It seems like an obvious next step would be to ask students (starting when they're kids) more and better questions about how they understand reading, what they're getting out of books, what feels bad, what feels good. Sometimes just letting words roll over you without too fine an attention to meaning feels good!
I do think that it can be hard to grow as a reader, and I don't think that just being an English major means that of course you cruise through old texts - being an English major means that you are learning to read old texts with relative ease and enjoyment. At the same time, if English majors are starting out where fourteen and fifteen year old high school students were in 1992, that's a major loss of ground.
posted by Frowner at 8:12 AM on May 13 [25 favorites]
Making this "the fault" of "bad English majors" is a mistake. Obviously something is wrong. I was in high school in the early nineties and we read two Dickens novels. We read a couple of short pieces (the beginning of David Copperfield and Dickens's own recollection of his childhood) when I was twelve or thirteen. Language has not drifted so much since 1992 that kids could read Dickens at fifteen and within twenty years college students could no longer read him. People hated Great Expectations (I hate it still and I'm a big Dickens enthusiast) but they could read it.
And the thing is Bleak House is a great novel - it's funny and extremely weird and very creepy in places and it has several powerful depictions of the kind of evil that people don't always recognize when they meet it. Great Expectations, well, I find it extremely whiny, but it is a crime to fail people so that they cannot, while basically interested in reading, read and enjoy Bleak House. Once you get going with it, it is extremely, extremely readable. It deserves the kind of revival that Moby Dick has had, because it is just as bizarre.
It seems like an obvious next step would be to ask students (starting when they're kids) more and better questions about how they understand reading, what they're getting out of books, what feels bad, what feels good. Sometimes just letting words roll over you without too fine an attention to meaning feels good!
I do think that it can be hard to grow as a reader, and I don't think that just being an English major means that of course you cruise through old texts - being an English major means that you are learning to read old texts with relative ease and enjoyment. At the same time, if English majors are starting out where fourteen and fifteen year old high school students were in 1992, that's a major loss of ground.
posted by Frowner at 8:12 AM on May 13 [25 favorites]
(you really didn't get anything more than "It's November in London and it's muddy." You didn't notice or care about any of the details Dickens was setting, the mood he was providing? It was really just "it muddy" and that's it?)
Yeah not gonna lie, the way folks are responding to the passage in this thread isn't exactly disproving the tumblr post's interpretations.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:19 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
Yeah not gonna lie, the way folks are responding to the passage in this thread isn't exactly disproving the tumblr post's interpretations.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:19 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
It's possible the folks doing the research used their language more carefully and correctly than many of us: the article is called "They Can't Read Very Well" (emphasis added).
'Very well' is still subjective and relative, but it sounds like their data support that claim well enough in the context of English profs evaluating English majors.
posted by actuallyquite at 8:23 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
'Very well' is still subjective and relative, but it sounds like their data support that claim well enough in the context of English profs evaluating English majors.
posted by actuallyquite at 8:23 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I mean, reconsidering with the phrase "very well, according to an English prof" in mind, it makes perfect sense to me that most of us casual readers would be called merely "competent" in their rubric. We know what's going on in the passage just fine; they're expecting more than that from their students.
posted by actuallyquite at 8:30 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by actuallyquite at 8:30 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
ssg: "I think the problem was likely more that they were asked to read it aloud and interrupted and asked to explain the meaning verbally every few sentences. That's a nonsensical way to read a text like this."
Right?? Only an English major would ever read like that lol
All this talk of mud mudding muddily has reminded me of one of my favorite paragraphs from one of my favorite books:
Right?? Only an English major would ever read like that lol
All this talk of mud mudding muddily has reminded me of one of my favorite paragraphs from one of my favorite books:
Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted the light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was sombre. Brown varnished bookshelves lined the walls, filled with row upon row of those thick, heavy theological works which the second-hand booksellers generally sell by weight. The mantelpiece, the over-mantel, a towering structure of spindly pillars and little shelves, were brown and varnished. The writing-desk was brown and varnished. So were the chairs, so was the door. A dark red-brown carpet with patterns covered the floor. Everything was brown in the room, and there was a curious brownish smell.posted by phunniemee at 8:31 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
I mean,
I mean, if you asked me to summarize the first 3 paragraphs I'd say fog, mud, drear, London. That is what I think a good reader would take away from this on a cursory read. I grew up reading Dickens for fun and never found him hard, and I would consider spelling out the literal interpretation of each sentence too stupid - and too irrelevant - to bother with unless explicitly told to. But apparently I would get docked as "using oversimplified phrases to summarize". Why is gestalt reading equated with illiteracy? If you want to understand if I'm capable of reaching a literal understanding, make that clear in your prompt. Did they?
It's like telling someone to watch a magic trick and then report what they saw. Do you dock someone for saying "The magician made a rabbit come out of a hat and I was amazed" instead of "The magician lifted a black silk hat in their left hand and practiced misdirection in order to divert the audience's attention while accessing a hidden compartment in which..."? Only if you explicitly made it clear that was the only acceptable type of response. And is it the only legitimate way to approach a magic performance?
Or telling someone to watch the opening scene of the movie Up and describe it. If I described it as a heartbreaking depiction of love and connection and loss and grief - purely a vibes-based description - would that mean I don't know how to watch movies? That I missed the point? If I said "boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they fall in love and get married and build a house together and she dies" would that not be enough either? Should I explain all the details on an "every frame a painting" level? Should I explain the architecture of the house? To me that would feel like missing the point, in the context of a basic "describe the scene" prompt.
Reading "whiskers" and deciding it means "cats" is bad. It shows an unfamiliarity with older vocabulary. At the same time, have you read those 7 first paragraphs? Do you not find yourself confused by anything in them?
Really, I think the question shouldn't be "do readers rely on incomplete scaffolds (bad) instead of coming to a complete understanding of each section before proceeding (good)." It should be "are they capable of building such scaffolds to grapple with difficult texts, and constantly revisiting and solidifying these scaffolds as they read as they read", "are the guesses they have made and the conclusions they have reached by the time they're finished of sufficient quality to accurately understand most of the text, and all of the really important parts", "are they able to retain the information they've learned and apply it to the next text they read", and so on.
And I think it would be interesting to see how typical students deal with different texts from different cultural and technical domains. What kinds of knowledge do most have? What kinds of knowledge do most lack? What kinds of texts are they best and worst equipped to deal with at both the casual and the analytical level?
posted by trig at 8:32 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
96 percent of the problematic readers used oversimplified phrases atEmphasis mine.
least once to summarize a sentence in the test passage while 61 percent
used this method for five or more sentences. Often, subjects used this tactic
as a shortcut when they became overwhelmed by a sentence with multiple
clauses. One subject disclosed that oversimplifying was her normal tactic,
explaining, “I normally don’t try to analyze individual sentences as I’m
reading something. I try to look at the overall bigger picture of what’s
going on.” Another subject said that she separated reading from thinking:
“I’m just reading it [the text]; I’m not thinking about it yet.” Those subjects,
however, who relied on oversimplification became more and more lost as
they continued to read the test passage. In fact, 82 percent of the problem-
atic readers told the facilitators that they were confused at least once dur-
ing the test, and 26 percent said they were lost five or more times.
I mean, if you asked me to summarize the first 3 paragraphs I'd say fog, mud, drear, London. That is what I think a good reader would take away from this on a cursory read. I grew up reading Dickens for fun and never found him hard, and I would consider spelling out the literal interpretation of each sentence too stupid - and too irrelevant - to bother with unless explicitly told to. But apparently I would get docked as "using oversimplified phrases to summarize". Why is gestalt reading equated with illiteracy? If you want to understand if I'm capable of reaching a literal understanding, make that clear in your prompt. Did they?
It's like telling someone to watch a magic trick and then report what they saw. Do you dock someone for saying "The magician made a rabbit come out of a hat and I was amazed" instead of "The magician lifted a black silk hat in their left hand and practiced misdirection in order to divert the audience's attention while accessing a hidden compartment in which..."? Only if you explicitly made it clear that was the only acceptable type of response. And is it the only legitimate way to approach a magic performance?
Or telling someone to watch the opening scene of the movie Up and describe it. If I described it as a heartbreaking depiction of love and connection and loss and grief - purely a vibes-based description - would that mean I don't know how to watch movies? That I missed the point? If I said "boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they fall in love and get married and build a house together and she dies" would that not be enough either? Should I explain all the details on an "every frame a painting" level? Should I explain the architecture of the house? To me that would feel like missing the point, in the context of a basic "describe the scene" prompt.
Reading "whiskers" and deciding it means "cats" is bad. It shows an unfamiliarity with older vocabulary. At the same time, have you read those 7 first paragraphs? Do you not find yourself confused by anything in them?
Really, I think the question shouldn't be "do readers rely on incomplete scaffolds (bad) instead of coming to a complete understanding of each section before proceeding (good)." It should be "are they capable of building such scaffolds to grapple with difficult texts, and constantly revisiting and solidifying these scaffolds as they read as they read", "are the guesses they have made and the conclusions they have reached by the time they're finished of sufficient quality to accurately understand most of the text, and all of the really important parts", "are they able to retain the information they've learned and apply it to the next text they read", and so on.
And I think it would be interesting to see how typical students deal with different texts from different cultural and technical domains. What kinds of knowledge do most have? What kinds of knowledge do most lack? What kinds of texts are they best and worst equipped to deal with at both the casual and the analytical level?
posted by trig at 8:32 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
probably no BBC dramatization managed to slip in a Megalosaurus but I can hope.
And for those who haven't actually read Bleak House , it has a character die of spontaneous combustion, and the BBC productions in both 1985 and 2005 represent it as lights in the window and lasers under the door, so don't hold your breath for dinosaurs.
posted by dannyboybell at 8:34 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
And for those who haven't actually read Bleak House , it has a character die of spontaneous combustion, and the BBC productions in both 1985 and 2005 represent it as lights in the window and lasers under the door, so don't hold your breath for dinosaurs.
posted by dannyboybell at 8:34 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
I wrote this in another thread by accident, so it is probably too late here, but here it is anyway:
Bleak House, and especially the beginning of Bleak House, seems like a pretty terrible text to evaluate the reading skills of midwestern college students. None of the context of Bleak House would be even vaguely familiar to them and in the first seven paragraphs, nothing really happens except a roll call of non-characters who are very specifically supposed to seem soporific.
I have both a degree in common law and a penchant for reading English historical romance novels -- so way, way more context than a typical reader -- plus I have already fucking read Bleak House and I still would have trouble restating the first few paragraphs in plain English. The weather sucks, a bunch of boring and inconsequential people are boring and inconsequential.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:36 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Bleak House, and especially the beginning of Bleak House, seems like a pretty terrible text to evaluate the reading skills of midwestern college students. None of the context of Bleak House would be even vaguely familiar to them and in the first seven paragraphs, nothing really happens except a roll call of non-characters who are very specifically supposed to seem soporific.
I have both a degree in common law and a penchant for reading English historical romance novels -- so way, way more context than a typical reader -- plus I have already fucking read Bleak House and I still would have trouble restating the first few paragraphs in plain English. The weather sucks, a bunch of boring and inconsequential people are boring and inconsequential.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:36 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Lurking under a lot of conversations about English majors, old books and Dickens is the American assumption that novels written prior to maybe 1930 (or even 1950) are all bad and boring and simple-minded, unless they have a lot of publicity (like Jane Austen). Only weirdos really want to read them, the people who must read them don't and can't enjoy them, there's no real value in reading them, etc. A normal person would much prefer a contemporary novel, probably a very contemporary novel.
So it's sort of unfair to expect people, even English majors, to know or care about all that boring shit - what are they going to get out of it, anyway? Some totally discredited asshole is going on about fog and fog and fog, why would it be worthwhile to slog through that?
I think we all get this unconsciously - certainly in the last six or seven years I've read a LOT of 18th and 19th century fiction, at least compared to what I'd read as sort of your average fairly-well-read nerd, and I'm constantly thinking "wow, this is actually very sophisticated!" and "wow, what subtle understandings of the world are on display!"....and frankly it's kind of bullshit that my default is "I am amazed that a smart and accomplished human could think in a subtle way given that they lived before I was born".
Instead of thinking, "how can I read carefully and interpret", I'm usually starting from a position of "this was written in 1870 so it is probably SOME BULLSHIT, prove yourself to me, novel", and of course I don't start from that point when reading things written in 2010, even though frankly I am not sure that humans have evolved past SOME BULLSHIT yet.
posted by Frowner at 8:38 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
So it's sort of unfair to expect people, even English majors, to know or care about all that boring shit - what are they going to get out of it, anyway? Some totally discredited asshole is going on about fog and fog and fog, why would it be worthwhile to slog through that?
I think we all get this unconsciously - certainly in the last six or seven years I've read a LOT of 18th and 19th century fiction, at least compared to what I'd read as sort of your average fairly-well-read nerd, and I'm constantly thinking "wow, this is actually very sophisticated!" and "wow, what subtle understandings of the world are on display!"....and frankly it's kind of bullshit that my default is "I am amazed that a smart and accomplished human could think in a subtle way given that they lived before I was born".
Instead of thinking, "how can I read carefully and interpret", I'm usually starting from a position of "this was written in 1870 so it is probably SOME BULLSHIT, prove yourself to me, novel", and of course I don't start from that point when reading things written in 2010, even though frankly I am not sure that humans have evolved past SOME BULLSHIT yet.
posted by Frowner at 8:38 AM on May 13 [11 favorites]
Like, this is the level of prompting the participants seem to have gotten:
What would have been considered a sufficient answer? Naming all the nouns? Giving a poetical rephrasing? An interpretation of the effect of the repetition and focus on fogginess? What's sufficient and what's "oversimplified"? Would an answer like "the heavy pervasiveness of the fog is the point, I don't really think it matters if there's a train versus a ship" be a sign of illiteracy?
posted by trig at 8:38 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog"What do you see in this sentence besides fog."
lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial
part of the city?
Facilitator: O.K.
What would have been considered a sufficient answer? Naming all the nouns? Giving a poetical rephrasing? An interpretation of the effect of the repetition and focus on fogginess? What's sufficient and what's "oversimplified"? Would an answer like "the heavy pervasiveness of the fog is the point, I don't really think it matters if there's a train versus a ship" be a sign of illiteracy?
posted by trig at 8:38 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
What no one has mentioned yet is that the study sample consisted of students at two Kansas universities who had almost all gone to Kansas public high schools. I’m not noting this to point and laugh at Kansas; I myself come from a point-and-laugh state. I also don’t dispute that American public education has serious issues nationwide. I just wonder how that plays into the education they received and the local issues it had.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:38 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 8:38 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
> I just wonder how that plays into the education they received and the local issues it had.
The study also says:
posted by postcommunism at 8:45 AM on May 13
The study also says:
A principal concern for us was to test whether the subjects hadWhich may be concerning in a very familiar way, but which still doesn't necessarily jibe with the test's methodology.
reached a level of “proficient-prose literacy,” which is defined by the
U. S. Department of Education as the capability of “reading lengthy, com-
plex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making
complex inferences” (National Center 3). According to ACT, Inc., this
level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension
section of the ACT (Reading)
[...]
The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT
Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing
Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,”
posted by postcommunism at 8:45 AM on May 13
I would like results sorted by “regular English major” and “English instruction major” since imx teaching and teacher prep involves a lot of reading that’s really different than regular English reading.
Reading for teaching, especially the reading you do for credentials and continuing ed (so much continuing ed) involves piles of pdfs of aggregated materials that may be repetitive, disjointed, missing pages, or completely irrelevant to the topic bc the person in charge of teaching the course is too overwhelmed to actually review and revise the reading load for the teacher/students.
Anecdotally after two-thirds of a reading endorsement and all the other required bullshit I had to read, I didn’t read for pleasure almost the whole decade I was teaching, and the quality of my reading and comprehension took a dive out of sheer fatigue.
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:52 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Reading for teaching, especially the reading you do for credentials and continuing ed (so much continuing ed) involves piles of pdfs of aggregated materials that may be repetitive, disjointed, missing pages, or completely irrelevant to the topic bc the person in charge of teaching the course is too overwhelmed to actually review and revise the reading load for the teacher/students.
Anecdotally after two-thirds of a reading endorsement and all the other required bullshit I had to read, I didn’t read for pleasure almost the whole decade I was teaching, and the quality of my reading and comprehension took a dive out of sheer fatigue.
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:52 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
The study is pretty interesting, if depresssing!
I can't help but see these results, and a lot of the comments here, as also reflective of decades of Anglo-american culture that also privileges "plain language" or "straight talk" as some kind of ideal.
I'm not really going to get into the problems with that (it's definitely a pet peeve of mine!), but it parallels some of the worries about AI leading to people being less inclined to remember things or think critically. When we assume that we're making things "easy" for people to read, we're also depriving people of opportunities to learn the very reading strategies the study indicates that many students lack, because they're never encountering these kinds of challenges.
posted by The_transcontinental at 8:54 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
I can't help but see these results, and a lot of the comments here, as also reflective of decades of Anglo-american culture that also privileges "plain language" or "straight talk" as some kind of ideal.
I'm not really going to get into the problems with that (it's definitely a pet peeve of mine!), but it parallels some of the worries about AI leading to people being less inclined to remember things or think critically. When we assume that we're making things "easy" for people to read, we're also depriving people of opportunities to learn the very reading strategies the study indicates that many students lack, because they're never encountering these kinds of challenges.
posted by The_transcontinental at 8:54 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
One thing I noticed when I was, like, twelve is that anything written before the 1920s or so is difficult and tedious to read. The stylistic, linguistic, and cultural differences are just too much, and it's going to be about as much fun as reading one of those tedious modern novels about depressing relationships and cancer. Foreign language books with good modern translations are an exception to this rule, but older translations are worst of all.
I would expect that for people younger than me, the cutoff date is later than the 1920s. I wouldn't be surprised if modern highschool students have trouble with Fitzgerald or Hemingway, just because of how they are written.
After a lot of time and a lot of reading, I've pushed the boundary of what I find easy and enjoyable to read back as far as Austen, but that wasn't an easy or quick process. To me, it seems deeply misguided to use Dickens as a benchmark for reading comprehension. They might as well use Beowulf, and then complain that the kids today can't even understand something as simple as "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
posted by surlyben at 8:55 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
I would expect that for people younger than me, the cutoff date is later than the 1920s. I wouldn't be surprised if modern highschool students have trouble with Fitzgerald or Hemingway, just because of how they are written.
After a lot of time and a lot of reading, I've pushed the boundary of what I find easy and enjoyable to read back as far as Austen, but that wasn't an easy or quick process. To me, it seems deeply misguided to use Dickens as a benchmark for reading comprehension. They might as well use Beowulf, and then complain that the kids today can't even understand something as simple as "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.”
posted by surlyben at 8:55 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
Non-English major here - I get that close reading and such are skills that lit majors are expected to develop, but are they expected to practice and demonstrate these skills while reading an entirely new-to-them text aloud? This is a genuine question as the thought of doing so seems absolutely insane to me. I consider myself a very fluent reader who enjoys reading for leisure and personal development, but the few times I've been put on the spot to read a text cold, the only thing going through my mind has been a constant litany of "oh fuck oh fuck" while trying desperately to make the correct mouth sounds at the correct times.
posted by btfreek at 8:55 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
posted by btfreek at 8:55 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
London was foggy and miserable and Dickens goes on about it like he got paid by the word.
Bleak House was published in 20 monthly installments, so being paid by the word is probably not too far from the actual truth.
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:05 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
Bleak House was published in 20 monthly installments, so being paid by the word is probably not too far from the actual truth.
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:05 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
it is incredible to me that no one here who encountered a word they did not know in this excerpt seemed to consider using a dictionary or "bothered" to "look it up," which is also a solution available to the readers we're discussing. in that light, it seems like maybe there's also a lack of modeling for young people.
"filterati," is this anything
posted by sickos haha yes dot jpg at 9:08 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
"filterati," is this anything
posted by sickos haha yes dot jpg at 9:08 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Non-English major here - I get that close reading and such are skills that lit majors are expected to develop, but are they expected to practice and demonstrate these skills while reading an entirely new-to-them text aloud?
Yes? Though I don't know if that has changed in very recent times. The expectation was that yes, you could read a thing and talk about it credibly, out loud, in class.
I've pushed the boundary of what I find easy and enjoyable to read back as far as Austen, but that wasn't an easy or quick process.
Easy and enjoyable cannot be the benchmark for a field of fucking study! Sometimes you have to do a hard thing and persevere through it because there is value in something even if it isn't a fucking blast and a half! These are people studying for a possible entire career in the analysis and teaching of language, reading, and literature. They can't just read Harry Potter forever.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:08 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
Yes? Though I don't know if that has changed in very recent times. The expectation was that yes, you could read a thing and talk about it credibly, out loud, in class.
I've pushed the boundary of what I find easy and enjoyable to read back as far as Austen, but that wasn't an easy or quick process.
Easy and enjoyable cannot be the benchmark for a field of fucking study! Sometimes you have to do a hard thing and persevere through it because there is value in something even if it isn't a fucking blast and a half! These are people studying for a possible entire career in the analysis and teaching of language, reading, and literature. They can't just read Harry Potter forever.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:08 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
Like, this is the level of prompting the participants seem to have gotten:
That's the prompting they got during the task, but we don't know the directions that were given to them at the start of the task. They were told about reference materials they could access and that they could use their phones, so there was some kind of initial orientation to the task. Unclear if that included, for example, that the researchers were looking for the literal meaning of each sentence, or if it was a more vague "tell us your thought process" or "summarize what you read" kind of instruction.
posted by actuallyquite at 9:13 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
That's the prompting they got during the task, but we don't know the directions that were given to them at the start of the task. They were told about reference materials they could access and that they could use their phones, so there was some kind of initial orientation to the task. Unclear if that included, for example, that the researchers were looking for the literal meaning of each sentence, or if it was a more vague "tell us your thought process" or "summarize what you read" kind of instruction.
posted by actuallyquite at 9:13 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
There are longer-than-Dickens LitRPG and similar series in busy rotation at my local library, with complicated backstories and world building. (Often in translation!) Am wondering whether Dickens would have found them heavy going.
posted by clew at 9:16 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
posted by clew at 9:16 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
For me, the opening passages of Bleak House are not only perfectly cromulent, but feel like sitting down in a comfortable old chair.
But then again, I have read Bleak House before, studied 19th century English social history, know a thing or two about Medieval English Christianity, have been to the Inns of Court, can picture Temple Bar in my mind, and know what the Court of Chancery does. There is no way I can now separate my experience of reading this text from these things.
And that is entirely the problem- there is no way a young person in the 21st century United States should be expected to have enough context to parse meaning from these passages on first reading. There are simply too many colloquialisms, archaisms (of both form and content), and obscure references. Why should a high school or college student even know what Dickens means by a horse's "blinkers"? I think even in very rural parts of the US they are called "blinders" anyway.
The way to teach these passages is to tell students, "Okay, Dickens is trying to create a 'vibe' here. Can we figure out what kind of feelings he wants us to have about these scenes? What are some questions we can ask to help us with this? What is Lincoln's Inn? When is Michaelmas Term? Where would we find this information?"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:18 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
For me, the opening passages of Bleak House are not only perfectly cromulent, but feel like sitting down in a comfortable old chair.
But then again, I have read Bleak House before, studied 19th century English social history, know a thing or two about Medieval English Christianity, have been to the Inns of Court, can picture Temple Bar in my mind, and know what the Court of Chancery does. There is no way I can now separate my experience of reading this text from these things.
And that is entirely the problem- there is no way a young person in the 21st century United States should be expected to have enough context to parse meaning from these passages on first reading. There are simply too many colloquialisms, archaisms (of both form and content), and obscure references. Why should a high school or college student even know what Dickens means by a horse's "blinkers"? I think even in very rural parts of the US they are called "blinders" anyway.
The way to teach these passages is to tell students, "Okay, Dickens is trying to create a 'vibe' here. Can we figure out what kind of feelings he wants us to have about these scenes? What are some questions we can ask to help us with this? What is Lincoln's Inn? When is Michaelmas Term? Where would we find this information?"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:18 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Back in the day, this site had a lot of liberal arts majors. I guess not so much anymore.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:19 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 9:19 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
I mean, that's one way to read this discussion... :-)
posted by trig at 9:21 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by trig at 9:21 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
I was an English major (well, comparative literature), good enough to be accepted into ivy league PhD programs (did not finish the PhD, hope that excuses the brag). And had I been part of this study, they definitely would have deemed me illiterate. For so many reasons, all of them mentioned in his thread.
I'll just say - reading a literary text for literal meaning, besides being boring, is not the end goal of an English major. You need to grasp the literal meaning at some point, but whether it's at the first pass is very personal to the way you read. I'd actually say only the poorest English major is focused on the literal - a person with little imagination and reading flexibility. Your mind should be reaching in all sorts of directions at once.
posted by kitcat at 9:21 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
I'll just say - reading a literary text for literal meaning, besides being boring, is not the end goal of an English major. You need to grasp the literal meaning at some point, but whether it's at the first pass is very personal to the way you read. I'd actually say only the poorest English major is focused on the literal - a person with little imagination and reading flexibility. Your mind should be reaching in all sorts of directions at once.
posted by kitcat at 9:21 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Getting the lowest score because I am distracted by the first word of the excerpt and spend the entire examination period explaining my concept of a world where the dominant religion is Michaelianity, a faith founded thousands of years ago by George Michael
posted by theodolite at 9:22 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
posted by theodolite at 9:22 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
"What do you see in this sentence besides fog."
Please sir, nothing sir, the fog's too thick sir
posted by flabdablet at 9:27 AM on May 13 [32 favorites]
Please sir, nothing sir, the fog's too thick sir
posted by flabdablet at 9:27 AM on May 13 [32 favorites]
Well I guess it would be nice if I could touch this body of text I know not everybody has got a body of text like you
posted by phunniemee at 9:27 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 9:27 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
toodleydoodley ’s description of education in teaching reading making one a worse reader is
pretty Dickensian
all hustle and grind, even once you graduate
grad
Gradgrind
posted by clew at 9:28 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
pretty Dickensian
all hustle and grind, even once you graduate
grad
Gradgrind
posted by clew at 9:28 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
For about a decade, my parents would hold a Burns supper every year and invite all their neighbours. As part of the festivities, they'd have a reading of Burns' epic poem Tam o' Shanter where each person would read a few stanzas, then pass the book round the table to the next person, until the poem was finished. After ten years of doing this, several of the guests let my parents know that they had no idea at all what the poem is about. Nothing. No idea that Tam's drunkenly making his way home from the pub to his wife who's angry with him, no idea why the devil's involved, no idea who or what Meg is or what happens to her tail, what the hell a Cutty Sark might be. Nothing.
I should probably have been less surprised by this than I was, given that most of them were English transplants and the Scots is a bit broad and archaic, but that no idea at all really surprised me.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:29 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I should probably have been less surprised by this than I was, given that most of them were English transplants and the Scots is a bit broad and archaic, but that no idea at all really surprised me.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:29 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Easy and enjoyable cannot be the benchmark for a field of fucking study! Sometimes you have to do a hard thing and persevere through it because there is value in something even if it isn't a fucking blast and a half! These are people studying for a possible entire career in the analysis and teaching of language, reading, and literature. They can't just read Harry Potter forever.
I fully agree with this and yet - is "these guys can only read Harry Potter" (a text some 19th-century readers might experience some confusion with) a fair conclusion to draw from this study?
The study expected these students to do a critical read of the text (whether or not it informed them of this expectation). Should we not read the study critically too? Debate whether its methodology actually justified its conclusions, or was a reasonable was to investigate the research question? Or should we just accept its conclusions and move on?
posted by trig at 9:33 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
I fully agree with this and yet - is "these guys can only read Harry Potter" (a text some 19th-century readers might experience some confusion with) a fair conclusion to draw from this study?
The study expected these students to do a critical read of the text (whether or not it informed them of this expectation). Should we not read the study critically too? Debate whether its methodology actually justified its conclusions, or was a reasonable was to investigate the research question? Or should we just accept its conclusions and move on?
posted by trig at 9:33 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
This wasn't written in the same way as the academic articles I usually read so I looked up the journal. "The CEA Critic publishes scholarly works that, through "close reading" methodology, examine the texts of fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction, and film studied on the college level." So okay, that's their kink, though I'm still not convinced their facilitators (some of whom were literally classmates of subjects included in the study, so not necessarily the best trained) consistently made it clear that they wanted more than "it was foggy everywhere."
(If I were a subject in this study I would assume they wanted to know my normal reading methodology, which doesn't include looking up words or background unless I'm completely lost.)
posted by metasarah at 9:34 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
(If I were a subject in this study I would assume they wanted to know my normal reading methodology, which doesn't include looking up words or background unless I'm completely lost.)
posted by metasarah at 9:34 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I'll just say - reading a literary text for literal meaning, besides being boring, is not the end goal of an English major.
No and holding a brush is not the end goal of a painter but it's a pretty important fucking step
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:34 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
No and holding a brush is not the end goal of a painter but it's a pretty important fucking step
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:34 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
Now I have an image in my head of a stereotypical tweed-clad English professor looking down over their spectacles and declaring that only an illiterate, a verifiable idiot, would assume from context that a thing with a caboose is a train.
posted by ssg at 9:35 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by ssg at 9:35 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Hi, English major.
For the most part I despised every assigned book in school apart from Shakespeare,
Me too! I hated the classics! They are all downers! I can tell you very few books I read in high school/college that I didn't hate! People don't necessarily relate to them these days, and if you're not already hooked on reading fun things you enjoy before you hit middle school, why would you like to read later?
I’m gonna be honest, I just found the beginning of Bleak House and tried to read the first six paragraphs and it sure is hard to read. My eyes just wanna skim across it for something that’s not descriptions of the scene and find people and plot and story. It’s not until the eight paragraph that Dickens begins talking about the court case that a glimpse at the Wikipedia page for this book tells me is a major part of the plot, and he’s actually kind of funny and entertaining. Asking me “what happened in those first paragraphs” would get a big shrug: “it was foggy in England and Dickens sure was getting paid by the word”
Our teacher finally burst out with the critical thing we were all missing: it's funny!. That miserable passage had been written to be comic.
Y'all, it was not funny.
I hated reading Dickens in school, especially since once again, it was all downer material. Also, I HATE VIVID DESCRIPTION, I don't picture things in my head upon reading them very well, and I want plot and personality, not to know what the trees look like. Unless the trees start to attack you, otherwise I don't care.
Literally, the only part of the VIVID DESCRIPTION that stood out for me in that first Bleak House paragraph was this:
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill
because "you're suddenly throwing a random dinosaur into this scene where it makes no sense to bring in a dinosaur" DID interrupt my bored glazing-over of description to at least make me go "Huh?!"
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:36 AM on May 13
For the most part I despised every assigned book in school apart from Shakespeare,
Me too! I hated the classics! They are all downers! I can tell you very few books I read in high school/college that I didn't hate! People don't necessarily relate to them these days, and if you're not already hooked on reading fun things you enjoy before you hit middle school, why would you like to read later?
I’m gonna be honest, I just found the beginning of Bleak House and tried to read the first six paragraphs and it sure is hard to read. My eyes just wanna skim across it for something that’s not descriptions of the scene and find people and plot and story. It’s not until the eight paragraph that Dickens begins talking about the court case that a glimpse at the Wikipedia page for this book tells me is a major part of the plot, and he’s actually kind of funny and entertaining. Asking me “what happened in those first paragraphs” would get a big shrug: “it was foggy in England and Dickens sure was getting paid by the word”
Our teacher finally burst out with the critical thing we were all missing: it's funny!. That miserable passage had been written to be comic.
Y'all, it was not funny.
I hated reading Dickens in school, especially since once again, it was all downer material. Also, I HATE VIVID DESCRIPTION, I don't picture things in my head upon reading them very well, and I want plot and personality, not to know what the trees look like. Unless the trees start to attack you, otherwise I don't care.
Literally, the only part of the VIVID DESCRIPTION that stood out for me in that first Bleak House paragraph was this:
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill
because "you're suddenly throwing a random dinosaur into this scene where it makes no sense to bring in a dinosaur" DID interrupt my bored glazing-over of description to at least make me go "Huh?!"
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:36 AM on May 13
What no one has mentioned yet is that the study sample consisted of students at two Kansas universities who had almost all gone to Kansas public high schools.
On the other hand, if Kansan students don't immediately recognize a reference to the Biblical flood and then connect that to dinosaurs, it means that the efforts to sabotage public education in Kansas have also failed.
Also, I think Dickens, with his well-known prejudices against Americans, would have probably turned confusion over "whiskers" leading to the presence of a cat in the courtroom into a mildly humorous and somewhat denigrating passage of its own.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:37 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
On the other hand, if Kansan students don't immediately recognize a reference to the Biblical flood and then connect that to dinosaurs, it means that the efforts to sabotage public education in Kansas have also failed.
Also, I think Dickens, with his well-known prejudices against Americans, would have probably turned confusion over "whiskers" leading to the presence of a cat in the courtroom into a mildly humorous and somewhat denigrating passage of its own.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:37 AM on May 13 [12 favorites]
I fully agree with this and yet - is "these guys can only read Harry Potter" (a text some 19th-century readers might experience some confusion with) a fair conclusion to draw from this study?
It's not, which is because it isn't a conclusion I drew from the study, but a response to someone here, talking about how it's challenging to read things written in times that aren't very recent. Like, yes, of course, but the point of being in school is to learn how to do challenging things.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:38 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
It's not, which is because it isn't a conclusion I drew from the study, but a response to someone here, talking about how it's challenging to read things written in times that aren't very recent. Like, yes, of course, but the point of being in school is to learn how to do challenging things.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:38 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I'm generally a decent reader - why would I be here otherwise? - but I'll admit that I often feel the dull confusion of skimming through without much understanding when I try reading most philosophers.
posted by clawsoon at 9:38 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 9:38 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
I agree with trig that this study's methods seem a bit off and the conclusions drawn are hyperbolic. To quote a section from it:
posted by coffeecat at 9:38 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.I mean, why would anyone be able to immediately glean that specially the movement of the fog (vs. its pervasiveness) is worth noting if you're going line-by-line, or that it's supposed to be symbolic? It's also hard to imagine that the line-by-line quiz method wouldn't make most students feel increasingly inadequate and stressed - I'd imagine they'd do better if given the chance to read the passage independently all the way through first, and then discuss the meaning of each line with the facilitator. I mean, if I had to defend my interpretation line-by-line, I'd probably find reading pretty stressful and unpleasant and just want to get it over with.
Facilitator: O.K.
Subject: There’s just fog everywhere.
(A few minutes later in the taped session.)
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial part of the city?
Facilitator: O.K.
By reducing all these details in the passage to vague, generic language, the subject does not read closely enough to follow the fog as it moves through- out the shipyards. And, as she continues to skip over almost all the con- crete details in the following sentences, she never recognizes that this literal fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion, disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery.
posted by coffeecat at 9:38 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
No and holding a brush is not the end goal of a painter but it's a pretty important fucking step
Oh yes I love painting and how there's definitely only one truly correct approach, here's another opportunity to shoehorn in one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books:
Oh yes I love painting and how there's definitely only one truly correct approach, here's another opportunity to shoehorn in one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books:
“There’s rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn’t there?” she ventured at last, and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical formula so gentle and at the same time so penetrating.posted by phunniemee at 9:39 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
"The reading comprehension on this site is piss-poor."
"How dare you say we piss on the poor!"
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:39 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
"How dare you say we piss on the poor!"
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:39 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
Okay, I'm 30. My first two degrees are in a hard science and my third (ongoing) is in engineering. I was raised by a high-school English teacher who had a Masters in English literature and the house was always full of books, many (most?) of them published before 1920. I haven't had any kind of formal instruction in any kind of literature since high school.
'Read and understand the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House' is something I (and my much less hyperlexic siblings) were all able to do at twelve years old. By the time I was 16 I was reading and understanding the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and taking exams where 'here's a passage of Dickens (or Shakespeare, or Melville, or Bronte) that you may or may not have ever seen before; you have half an hour to pick it apart and explain what it means, how the author is creating the effects they're creating, and why, and you do not get any reference material to help you' was not an unusual question. I aced those, btw. I also read Trainspotting for fun in my late teens and it turns out broad Scots is not actually that hard? Just read it out loud if you get stuck. The biggest difficulty I had with Trainspotting was that it took me three weeks to stop talking with a Scottish accent.
Listen, I know I'm an outlier, I know I read a lot, and a lot of stuff people my age consider difficult, for fun, but why in hell would you sign up for a degree in English if you aren't up to speed with this shit? It's like signing up for a chemistry degree without knowing how the periodic table works.
This is really bad that English majors - people who have chosen to study English literature at university! - cannot do a close reading, or indeed a reading for literal meaning, on demand with any reference resources they want. This is really really bad.
Also - one of my Mum's university professors assigned the Bible - the whole Bible - the KJV - as mandatory reading for the first semester. If you don't get Bible references, a huge amount of English literature is going to fly straight over your head, because it is thick with them.
posted by ngaiotonga at 9:40 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
'Read and understand the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House' is something I (and my much less hyperlexic siblings) were all able to do at twelve years old. By the time I was 16 I was reading and understanding the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and taking exams where 'here's a passage of Dickens (or Shakespeare, or Melville, or Bronte) that you may or may not have ever seen before; you have half an hour to pick it apart and explain what it means, how the author is creating the effects they're creating, and why, and you do not get any reference material to help you' was not an unusual question. I aced those, btw. I also read Trainspotting for fun in my late teens and it turns out broad Scots is not actually that hard? Just read it out loud if you get stuck. The biggest difficulty I had with Trainspotting was that it took me three weeks to stop talking with a Scottish accent.
Listen, I know I'm an outlier, I know I read a lot, and a lot of stuff people my age consider difficult, for fun, but why in hell would you sign up for a degree in English if you aren't up to speed with this shit? It's like signing up for a chemistry degree without knowing how the periodic table works.
This is really bad that English majors - people who have chosen to study English literature at university! - cannot do a close reading, or indeed a reading for literal meaning, on demand with any reference resources they want. This is really really bad.
Also - one of my Mum's university professors assigned the Bible - the whole Bible - the KJV - as mandatory reading for the first semester. If you don't get Bible references, a huge amount of English literature is going to fly straight over your head, because it is thick with them.
posted by ngaiotonga at 9:40 AM on May 13 [14 favorites]
Yes that's definitely what I said, that there is a single way to paint and only one correct way, and not just that there are some very common tools of the fucking trade that most people would generally be expected to know about IF THEY ARE A PAINTER.
Also I meant (as in, what I had in my mind was) a painter of houses, but I realize that wasn't obvious.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:41 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Also I meant (as in, what I had in my mind was) a painter of houses, but I realize that wasn't obvious.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:41 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I apologize to all of the successful trained painters who have completed art school but never seen or heard of brushes and couldn't hold one if they tried, I'm sure you are very numerous and very acclaimed!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:42 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:42 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
After ten years of doing this, several of the guests let my parents know that they had no idea at all what the poem is about. Nothing.
Reminds me a little of the Gilmore Girls scene where people give plodding, somber, completely rhythm-less recitals of The Raven. (Like many things in the Gilmore Girls, I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be a criticism of the characters or if it reflected the writers' own understanding of the world.)
posted by trig at 9:42 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Reminds me a little of the Gilmore Girls scene where people give plodding, somber, completely rhythm-less recitals of The Raven. (Like many things in the Gilmore Girls, I couldn't tell if that was supposed to be a criticism of the characters or if it reflected the writers' own understanding of the world.)
posted by trig at 9:42 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
@ btfreek
Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently
The study doesn't deny that that cultural history knowledge informs reading proficiency and the subjects were tested on this before participating. Most had very little knowledge or retention from previous english classes. Maybe because they were confused because reading poorly?
I don't understand the criticism that Dickens is a poor choice because he's complex and not modern. I see that as the point. How do english majors read him? Do they look up unfamiliar words or skip past them, hoping it will all become clear? (The study indicates they just become more lost.) Do they groan over the liberal descriptions of London's "implacable weather" and skim? Do they ever wonder if Dickens' emphasis on fog and mud is significant rather than boring? Do they just not care that Dickens is describing a shipyard specifically, and maybe there's a reason? I've never read Bleak House so I can't speculate, but not to realize he is describing a shipyard is..problematic.
Even as a non english major who rarely reads novels I know that great writers have reasons for everything they write. That's what makes them great.
posted by mygraycatbongo at 9:43 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently
The study doesn't deny that that cultural history knowledge informs reading proficiency and the subjects were tested on this before participating. Most had very little knowledge or retention from previous english classes. Maybe because they were confused because reading poorly?
I don't understand the criticism that Dickens is a poor choice because he's complex and not modern. I see that as the point. How do english majors read him? Do they look up unfamiliar words or skip past them, hoping it will all become clear? (The study indicates they just become more lost.) Do they groan over the liberal descriptions of London's "implacable weather" and skim? Do they ever wonder if Dickens' emphasis on fog and mud is significant rather than boring? Do they just not care that Dickens is describing a shipyard specifically, and maybe there's a reason? I've never read Bleak House so I can't speculate, but not to realize he is describing a shipyard is..problematic.
Even as a non english major who rarely reads novels I know that great writers have reasons for everything they write. That's what makes them great.
posted by mygraycatbongo at 9:43 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
And what's so interesting about the Megalosaurus is that Bleak House was written just when dinosaurs were a Big Thing for Victorian England - it was published right when the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were being created. People had dinosaurs on the brain!
And obviously, this is NOT something that you'd know unless you know. It's not something that a random English major would be expected to know unless they specialized in the 19th century and thus would be all about science versus religion, new discoveries, doubts, etc.
But it is one of the reasons I like reading Dickens - he's really estranging. You go in thinking "blah blah Dickens 19th century cozy hoop skirts Christmas bland probably hypocritical morality" as you've learned from pop culture and whoops, all of the sudden there's dinosaurs, or a guy pulling corpses out of the Thames as his literal paid employment.
The more attentively you read old books, the weirder the past gets, and the weirder the past gets, the more the future can open up. This is one of the reasons that it really pisses me off when we leave people without good reading skills.
posted by Frowner at 9:43 AM on May 13 [31 favorites]
And obviously, this is NOT something that you'd know unless you know. It's not something that a random English major would be expected to know unless they specialized in the 19th century and thus would be all about science versus religion, new discoveries, doubts, etc.
But it is one of the reasons I like reading Dickens - he's really estranging. You go in thinking "blah blah Dickens 19th century cozy hoop skirts Christmas bland probably hypocritical morality" as you've learned from pop culture and whoops, all of the sudden there's dinosaurs, or a guy pulling corpses out of the Thames as his literal paid employment.
The more attentively you read old books, the weirder the past gets, and the weirder the past gets, the more the future can open up. This is one of the reasons that it really pisses me off when we leave people without good reading skills.
posted by Frowner at 9:43 AM on May 13 [31 favorites]
The study was depressing, but I'm not sure the results would have been that different back when I was in college. I think the reality is that there have always been a lot of people who couldn't read very well, as illustrated by the Jerome K. Jerome excerpt TheophileEscargot posted above.
When I was a freshman in high school (1976-77), we read Great Expectations. The ending Dickens originally wrote was a sad one where the main character didn't get the girl; she married someone else. He later revised it to one with this as the last sentence: I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
In class, we were asked to divide up into small groups and discuss the two endings and which one we preferred. I was the only one in my group who thought the second ending meant they stayed together. We argued about it and then asked the teacher. And the teacher agreed with the other kids in my group that the two endings were basically the same and they didn't end up together in either one!! Years later, I looked at the CliffsNotes on the book and confirmed that I was right.
When I was a senior in AP English, we read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Other kids in the class were so utterly bewildered by the start of it that the teacher had to devote a class to reviewing and discussing it to get them to the point where it began to make some sense. It starts out with Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo and, sure, that's an odd start to a book, but it instantly becomes clear that we're looking at scenes from the life of a very young child, who gradually becomes older over the next few paragraphs. At least, it was clear to me, but everyone else apparently just got stuck at moocow? WTF? and couldn't figure out what they were even reading about.
I wouldn't be surprised if college kids nowadays are worse at reading on average than college kids of the past, but I suspect the difference is not actually huge.
posted by Redstart at 9:53 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
When I was a freshman in high school (1976-77), we read Great Expectations. The ending Dickens originally wrote was a sad one where the main character didn't get the girl; she married someone else. He later revised it to one with this as the last sentence: I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
In class, we were asked to divide up into small groups and discuss the two endings and which one we preferred. I was the only one in my group who thought the second ending meant they stayed together. We argued about it and then asked the teacher. And the teacher agreed with the other kids in my group that the two endings were basically the same and they didn't end up together in either one!! Years later, I looked at the CliffsNotes on the book and confirmed that I was right.
When I was a senior in AP English, we read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Other kids in the class were so utterly bewildered by the start of it that the teacher had to devote a class to reviewing and discussing it to get them to the point where it began to make some sense. It starts out with Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo and, sure, that's an odd start to a book, but it instantly becomes clear that we're looking at scenes from the life of a very young child, who gradually becomes older over the next few paragraphs. At least, it was clear to me, but everyone else apparently just got stuck at moocow? WTF? and couldn't figure out what they were even reading about.
I wouldn't be surprised if college kids nowadays are worse at reading on average than college kids of the past, but I suspect the difference is not actually huge.
posted by Redstart at 9:53 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I apologize to all of the successful trained painters who have completed art school but never seen or heard of brushes and couldn't hold one if they tried, I'm sure you are very numerous and very acclaimed!
But if they're successful digital painters, or masters of Japanese black ink painting or ancient Greek vase-painting, are they bad at visual art if they don't know how to use oils or only at that particular form?
How far back is it critical for students to be able to read with ease? 200 years? 600? How many of Dickens' jokes and references should they be able to get off the bat? Pope's? Shakespeare's? Chaucer's?
(I actually really agree with you that people should grow up reading books from at *least* the past 200 years - and accessible books from around that time exist even for elementary schoolers: The Wizard of Oz is 125 years old; Little Women is 157! - and that it's a problem that people these days think a writer like Dickens is hard, both because I think the cognitive training to deal with complex writing styles contributes to a necessary willingness and ability to face and understand complex material in general, and because understanding of earlier cultural contexts is important for understanding the present. That said, I had expected the study to look at how students deal with the type of deeply recursive sentences that used to be more common in earlier centuries - a type of structure you get used to by reading lots of it, and the ability to parse which does seem more important to me than knowing specific vocabulary words. Regardless, "knowing how to read texts from a certain time period and culture" is different than "knowing how to read" - and both are different than "reading with one particular strategy rather than another". I found the study unconvincing as to both the extent and the actual nature of the problem.)
posted by trig at 9:59 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
But if they're successful digital painters, or masters of Japanese black ink painting or ancient Greek vase-painting, are they bad at visual art if they don't know how to use oils or only at that particular form?
How far back is it critical for students to be able to read with ease? 200 years? 600? How many of Dickens' jokes and references should they be able to get off the bat? Pope's? Shakespeare's? Chaucer's?
(I actually really agree with you that people should grow up reading books from at *least* the past 200 years - and accessible books from around that time exist even for elementary schoolers: The Wizard of Oz is 125 years old; Little Women is 157! - and that it's a problem that people these days think a writer like Dickens is hard, both because I think the cognitive training to deal with complex writing styles contributes to a necessary willingness and ability to face and understand complex material in general, and because understanding of earlier cultural contexts is important for understanding the present. That said, I had expected the study to look at how students deal with the type of deeply recursive sentences that used to be more common in earlier centuries - a type of structure you get used to by reading lots of it, and the ability to parse which does seem more important to me than knowing specific vocabulary words. Regardless, "knowing how to read texts from a certain time period and culture" is different than "knowing how to read" - and both are different than "reading with one particular strategy rather than another". I found the study unconvincing as to both the extent and the actual nature of the problem.)
posted by trig at 9:59 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
"a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief"
Reading "whiskers" and deciding it means "cats" is bad. It shows an unfamiliarity with older vocabulary.
But don't we think Dickens means to evoke the image of a cat with this description?
'What kind of cat was it? An advo-cat, of course!'
posted by jamjam at 10:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Reading "whiskers" and deciding it means "cats" is bad. It shows an unfamiliarity with older vocabulary.
But don't we think Dickens means to evoke the image of a cat with this description?
'What kind of cat was it? An advo-cat, of course!'
posted by jamjam at 10:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
jacquilynne: Bleak House, and especially the beginning of Bleak House, seems like a pretty terrible text to evaluate the reading skills of midwestern college students.
I would like to see a similar text tested on the professors, except that the passage is written entirely in the highly localized slang of a gang of Midwestern dropouts.
posted by clawsoon at 10:06 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I would like to see a similar text tested on the professors, except that the passage is written entirely in the highly localized slang of a gang of Midwestern dropouts.
posted by clawsoon at 10:06 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
But if they're successful digital painters, or masters of Japanese black ink painting or ancient Greek vase-painting, are they bad at visual art if they don't know how to use oils or only at that particular form?
I'm just saying that it is highly, maybe even vanishingly, unlikely that those people -- serious students of visual art! -- have no idea what a brush is or how to use it. That is literally it. Do you think I am wildly off base? That a master of Japanese black ink painting has no idea what a brush is, and that it doesn't matter? That none of the foundational techniques for Greek vase-painting rely on brushes? Like really. Think about it for even A second.
Fields have fundamentals. They just do. A cornerstone of teaching in any field is that you must often learn the boring, basic, nuts-and-bolts components of something before you can get buckwild with it. So yes, figuring out the literal events happening in a chunk of Dickens is not the most exciting and wonderful thing to do with it! But it's also a thing you have to learn at some point or you have nothing to hang the rest on.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:07 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I'm just saying that it is highly, maybe even vanishingly, unlikely that those people -- serious students of visual art! -- have no idea what a brush is or how to use it. That is literally it. Do you think I am wildly off base? That a master of Japanese black ink painting has no idea what a brush is, and that it doesn't matter? That none of the foundational techniques for Greek vase-painting rely on brushes? Like really. Think about it for even A second.
Fields have fundamentals. They just do. A cornerstone of teaching in any field is that you must often learn the boring, basic, nuts-and-bolts components of something before you can get buckwild with it. So yes, figuring out the literal events happening in a chunk of Dickens is not the most exciting and wonderful thing to do with it! But it's also a thing you have to learn at some point or you have nothing to hang the rest on.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:07 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Just dropping in to say that Bleak House is my favorite Dickens novel by a considerable stretch (and I'm not even that much of a Dickens fan). I reference it more than you might think, and not just because it includes one of my favorite literary deaths of all time (iykyk).
I was an English major and did not much care for 19th century English Lit while in college, because I was of the misguided assumption that it was all sexual repression andJane Austen marriage plot nonsense (which my 19 year old self could not abide--I've come around a little since). I was in it for the weird stuff and the rule breakers. I liked the modernists and the post-modernists, and as it turned out, way more 16th and 17th century lit than I would have guessed (but I digress). In most English Departments, including those at the kind of middling state university that I attended, you can get around reading Dickens if that's not your jam. I have a friend that used to brag about gaming the system because he managed to get a Lit degree without ever reading anything that predated 1900. He missed out some good, maybe even critical stuff (imho), but it can be done.
That said:
I think it is deeply weird that anyone would study English Literature that doesn't like/understand/want to read English Literature. I thought that back in the 1990s when English was way more of a fallback major. And I definitely think it's weird now. I mean, like, humanities departments are literally disappearing as we speak, there are no academic jobs, and whatever "creative economy" may have once provided a home for some of us is increasingly non-existent. So if you're doing English in the year of our lord 2015 (to say nothing of 2025), it feels like you'd have to be the sort of psychopath (I'm describing myself here) who'd be willing to run up 5 figures minimum of debt because you do love fog metaphors that much and can't wait to well actually about Michaelmas (or Milton's Satan or Middlemarch or Dostoevsky translations or Molly Bloom or James Baldwin or whatever) to your heathen family members back home or whatever. I mean, I did English Lit because I loved it to my bones, despite the fact that my parents really thought I ought to do something more practical--like at least Journalism for Christ sake (ha). I mean, I'm almost 50 years old, 27 years into a career, and my now-elderly parents are STILL emailing stories about how people go back to law school in their 50s or hey, honey, just wanted you to see that you can get an MBA from home over the internet!.
I guess this just strikes me as sad as much as anything else. Reading books, even the ones that were assigned in college, has always been transportative. I can't imagine anything more disappointing than signing up for the journey, packing all your bags, and missing out on the whole trip. I don't know how we do better here. But if even English majors are missing out on the ride, what a tragedy that is.
posted by Thivaia 2.0 at 10:07 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
I was an English major and did not much care for 19th century English Lit while in college, because I was of the misguided assumption that it was all sexual repression andJane Austen marriage plot nonsense (which my 19 year old self could not abide--I've come around a little since). I was in it for the weird stuff and the rule breakers. I liked the modernists and the post-modernists, and as it turned out, way more 16th and 17th century lit than I would have guessed (but I digress). In most English Departments, including those at the kind of middling state university that I attended, you can get around reading Dickens if that's not your jam. I have a friend that used to brag about gaming the system because he managed to get a Lit degree without ever reading anything that predated 1900. He missed out some good, maybe even critical stuff (imho), but it can be done.
That said:
I think it is deeply weird that anyone would study English Literature that doesn't like/understand/want to read English Literature. I thought that back in the 1990s when English was way more of a fallback major. And I definitely think it's weird now. I mean, like, humanities departments are literally disappearing as we speak, there are no academic jobs, and whatever "creative economy" may have once provided a home for some of us is increasingly non-existent. So if you're doing English in the year of our lord 2015 (to say nothing of 2025), it feels like you'd have to be the sort of psychopath (I'm describing myself here) who'd be willing to run up 5 figures minimum of debt because you do love fog metaphors that much and can't wait to well actually about Michaelmas (or Milton's Satan or Middlemarch or Dostoevsky translations or Molly Bloom or James Baldwin or whatever) to your heathen family members back home or whatever. I mean, I did English Lit because I loved it to my bones, despite the fact that my parents really thought I ought to do something more practical--like at least Journalism for Christ sake (ha). I mean, I'm almost 50 years old, 27 years into a career, and my now-elderly parents are STILL emailing stories about how people go back to law school in their 50s or hey, honey, just wanted you to see that you can get an MBA from home over the internet!.
I guess this just strikes me as sad as much as anything else. Reading books, even the ones that were assigned in college, has always been transportative. I can't imagine anything more disappointing than signing up for the journey, packing all your bags, and missing out on the whole trip. I don't know how we do better here. But if even English majors are missing out on the ride, what a tragedy that is.
posted by Thivaia 2.0 at 10:07 AM on May 13 [21 favorites]
it was published right when the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were being created
Dickens' idea of what a Megalosaurus looked like was very different to more recent (though still Victorian) reconstructions. We learned a lot about how to reconstruct fossils during Victoria's reign. It would be very wonderful to see Dickens' Megalosaur in the fog.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:08 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
Dickens' idea of what a Megalosaurus looked like was very different to more recent (though still Victorian) reconstructions. We learned a lot about how to reconstruct fossils during Victoria's reign. It would be very wonderful to see Dickens' Megalosaur in the fog.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:08 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
To be fair, I am now sitting here imagining that advo-cat, with notable whiskers, a small voice, and, apparently, underpants which the narrator finds tedious, which, considering the difficulty of getting underpants in a cat, seems rude.
Additionally, since it wouldn’t have been surprising to meet a dinosaur, perhaps we should infer that dinosaurs are fairly common in the Inns of Court, even if no examples were to hand in the scene.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:09 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Additionally, since it wouldn’t have been surprising to meet a dinosaur, perhaps we should infer that dinosaurs are fairly common in the Inns of Court, even if no examples were to hand in the scene.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:09 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Also:
🎶Ow, it’s a Bleak House
It’s mighty foggy, just lettin' it all roll in
It’s a Bleak House
The case is stacked and that's a fact
Don’t forget the advo-cat!🎶
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:13 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
🎶Ow, it’s a Bleak House
It’s mighty foggy, just lettin' it all roll in
It’s a Bleak House
The case is stacked and that's a fact
Don’t forget the advo-cat!🎶
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:13 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
Ah, here we are again, another car crash humanities thread. Perhaps because of the STEM/science fiction/coder orientation of the site, discussions here of "great literature" often implode in highly frustrating ways. It has something to do with shame (who wants to be told they can't read?) and perhaps some mix of literalism, discomfort with ambiguity, and a community of people who've always prided themselves on being the smart ones. People have been told that Dickens is Great Literature for so long, that when he doesn't immediately seem great, one quickly gets one's hackles up and either start to slag off literature in general or get into quasi-litigious debates about the framework we're using here to assess intelligence.
I'll confess: when I was in college, I was an English major who loved reading actually difficult texts, like the modernists and high theory, but I bailed on Bleak House. I think my problem was that I expected to read Dickens in a way not unlike this test, as a puzzle or problem to be decoded, rather than a highly addive, insanely creative and funny form of popular literature that actually had people waiting at the docks so they could binge the next installment.
Maybe to translate him to this audience, he seems like an antecedent for Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I actually came back to reading Dickens recently and was surprised by how often I laughed out loud. My then nine-year-old daughter asked me why I was laughing and I started reading her Great Expectations. Obviously, she didn't understand a lot or probably even most of it, but she was addicted to the love story and laughed out loud a lot herself.
My tip re Dickens and most "literature" is this: Don't read the passage from Bleak House and think, "If I don't get this, I am not a smart person." Don't get caught up in English common law, ecclesiastical history, or the exact definition of an "Inn."
Think instead these two things: (1) here is another human being who has something to communicate with me and I am so curious about what he is saying! Not knowing something is exciting because it allows me to be curious! (2) What is the emotional tone and energy of the writing and how can I enjoy it? Okay, here is the first paragraph again:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Okay, so this is amazing and it's not just about fog or scene-setting though we get that with remarkable concision in the first real sentence! We start with clipped sentences, ones that almost invite you to skim over them, only to be told how how "wonderful" it would be "to meet a Megalosaurus," which is described (as if it were the Penguin from the Adam West Batman show) as "waddling" up Holborn Hill. The narrator is a delightful kook! Now he's off describing the soot as black snowflakes and the dying sun. He's gone from giant lizards to apocalyptic goth poetry in just a few sentences--insane! Dogs, horses, rude pedestrians: we're world-building here and a lot of it is about Dickens riffing, performing, and charming you through jokes, exaggeration, metaphor, ad sheer energy. Take the idea of new crusts of mud "accumulating at compound interesting"--that is so amazing! And soon we're in a rolling poem about fog.
A lot of people have expressed their confusion over the legal stuff, but that paragraph about the High Chancellor is both an extremely vivid society sketch and Dickens taking the piss out of the legal class. The Lord High Chancellor "with a foggy glory round his head" is a doofus staring off into space. The lawyers who are "groping knee-deep in technicalities" are headbutting their wigs "against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces." This is almost like The Office!
Anyways, to summarize: Don't think about lexical meaning or what it says about you. Try to get the joke. It may be about finding a metaphor that can let you in the door. It's okay if you don't know everything!
posted by johnasdf at 10:14 AM on May 13 [24 favorites]
I'll confess: when I was in college, I was an English major who loved reading actually difficult texts, like the modernists and high theory, but I bailed on Bleak House. I think my problem was that I expected to read Dickens in a way not unlike this test, as a puzzle or problem to be decoded, rather than a highly addive, insanely creative and funny form of popular literature that actually had people waiting at the docks so they could binge the next installment.
Maybe to translate him to this audience, he seems like an antecedent for Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I actually came back to reading Dickens recently and was surprised by how often I laughed out loud. My then nine-year-old daughter asked me why I was laughing and I started reading her Great Expectations. Obviously, she didn't understand a lot or probably even most of it, but she was addicted to the love story and laughed out loud a lot herself.
My tip re Dickens and most "literature" is this: Don't read the passage from Bleak House and think, "If I don't get this, I am not a smart person." Don't get caught up in English common law, ecclesiastical history, or the exact definition of an "Inn."
Think instead these two things: (1) here is another human being who has something to communicate with me and I am so curious about what he is saying! Not knowing something is exciting because it allows me to be curious! (2) What is the emotional tone and energy of the writing and how can I enjoy it? Okay, here is the first paragraph again:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Okay, so this is amazing and it's not just about fog or scene-setting though we get that with remarkable concision in the first real sentence! We start with clipped sentences, ones that almost invite you to skim over them, only to be told how how "wonderful" it would be "to meet a Megalosaurus," which is described (as if it were the Penguin from the Adam West Batman show) as "waddling" up Holborn Hill. The narrator is a delightful kook! Now he's off describing the soot as black snowflakes and the dying sun. He's gone from giant lizards to apocalyptic goth poetry in just a few sentences--insane! Dogs, horses, rude pedestrians: we're world-building here and a lot of it is about Dickens riffing, performing, and charming you through jokes, exaggeration, metaphor, ad sheer energy. Take the idea of new crusts of mud "accumulating at compound interesting"--that is so amazing! And soon we're in a rolling poem about fog.
A lot of people have expressed their confusion over the legal stuff, but that paragraph about the High Chancellor is both an extremely vivid society sketch and Dickens taking the piss out of the legal class. The Lord High Chancellor "with a foggy glory round his head" is a doofus staring off into space. The lawyers who are "groping knee-deep in technicalities" are headbutting their wigs "against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces." This is almost like The Office!
Anyways, to summarize: Don't think about lexical meaning or what it says about you. Try to get the joke. It may be about finding a metaphor that can let you in the door. It's okay if you don't know everything!
posted by johnasdf at 10:14 AM on May 13 [24 favorites]
apparently, underpants which the narrator finds tedious, which, considering the difficulty of getting underpants in a cat, seems rude.
Can you not read? The underpants are clearly infinite.
posted by ssg at 10:17 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Can you not read? The underpants are clearly infinite.
posted by ssg at 10:17 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I'm just saying that it is highly, maybe even vanishingly, unlikely that those people -- serious students of visual art! -- have no idea what a brush is or how to use it.
This analogy doesn't reflect the situation accurately or in good faith.
posted by kitcat at 10:18 AM on May 13
This analogy doesn't reflect the situation accurately or in good faith.
posted by kitcat at 10:18 AM on May 13
Honestly now that I'm somehow being assailed for insufficient respect of Japanese ink arts because I think people should be able to read, I have no idea whatsoever what the situation IS.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:20 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:20 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
¶ 1. It is November in London and it is muddy.
¶ 2. It is foggy.
¶ 3. Very foggy. So foggy you feel like you're swimming through it? Oh wait no that's not what he means by mentioning "divers".
¶ 4. Very foggy indeed, next to a bar. Or a court. Or something.
¶ 5. Pretty sure it's a court now. Full of assholes.
¶ 6. We are definitely in a court. It sucks to be here and it should normally be full of people but now it is empty.
¶ 7. It is empty because a very tedious case is being heard.
¶ 8. in the fog we hear the foghorn roar of the megalosaurus as he stands in the fog of london, a kid sneaks into a cathedral to play ghidorah's summoning song on the pipe organ, ghidorah and megalosaurus fly above the streets ramming each other, until megalosaurus suffers a great unbinding of his bowels, raining shit upon the streets of london, which no one notices as they're already full of horseshit anyway, when you can see them in the fog of london
¶ 9. oliver holds his bowl where he has received a clamshell - "that's what ye get for asking for more" - the clamshell magically opens to reveal two three inch princesses dressed in pink - famished, oliver eats them - the man nods approvingly - "we'll make a tartar out of you yet"
posted by pyramid termite at 10:21 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Ah, here we are again, another car crash humanities thread. Perhaps because of the STEM/science fiction/coder orientation of the site, discussions here of "great literature" often implode in highly frustrating ways.
Or maybe people, including myself who was at one time an English major, just think this is a bad study? Maybe I should go on a tirade about how humanities students ("a community of people who've always prided themselves on being the smart ones") aren't smart enough to think critically about study design and data analysis?
posted by ssg at 10:21 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Or maybe people, including myself who was at one time an English major, just think this is a bad study? Maybe I should go on a tirade about how humanities students ("a community of people who've always prided themselves on being the smart ones") aren't smart enough to think critically about study design and data analysis?
posted by ssg at 10:21 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]
My tip re Dickens and most "literature" is this: Don't read the passage from Bleak House and think, "If I don't get this, I am not a smart person." Don't get caught up in English common law, ecclesiastical history, or the exact definition of an "Inn."
Um yes. This seems to be the general tone of this very thread that you're in.
What the FPP is about is a study that asked students to read and in real time parse the dickens out of the Dickens one sentence at a time and explain what it meant, and then when they didn't sufficiently derive meaningful impact from the one sentence at a time method, the study conductors determined they can't read.
posted by phunniemee at 10:23 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
Um yes. This seems to be the general tone of this very thread that you're in.
What the FPP is about is a study that asked students to read and in real time parse the dickens out of the Dickens one sentence at a time and explain what it meant, and then when they didn't sufficiently derive meaningful impact from the one sentence at a time method, the study conductors determined they can't read.
posted by phunniemee at 10:23 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...
Writing has evolved to where description is considered bad writing. If people want setting they will watch a video because you can see in a glance what it would take a writer five paragraphs to describe. But back in the day before videos, description was absolutely necessary to give the reader a setting. If you want to sell your writing now you have to leave the description out, unless you are aiming for the genre literary fiction. People don't want descriptive writing. It makes them impatient and feels like a digression. It doesn't work now in our culture. It's increasingly inaccessible.
Something to consider about writing done during Dicken's time is that your alternative was often what we would consider stultifying boredom. It was very common for the family to gather in the evening in an badly illuminated room and have one person sitting in the best light so they could read aloud. The alternative was to try to amuse each other by talking in the half light or possibly by having someone reread the Bible. The books that Dickens wrote came out as serials, so you would likely get one chapter a week. Another thing you could potentially do to break the boredom on the other five days is to invite people to dinner, choosing them by who was reputed to have had some interesting experiences they could recount. You could dine out on a good story, being invited by a couple of dozen different households over a period of weeks, on the understanding that you would amuse them by describing how you saw a bolting horse, or what you saw when you went to New York. You can see why Dickens wrote the way he did, if you know the context of who his audience was. It definitely wasn't your contemporary reader.
I don't think we will ever return to the era where high levels of literacy are widespread. There are too many competitors to complex detailed fiction, and not enough money available to publish detailed, highly textured books for widespread consumption. I won't say this is bad. Culture is used to sort us into our proper places, who belongs in our group and who has high status in it. The era when familiarity when English language novels were used to figure out who deserved a higher paying job is gone. There is absolutely no reason why they should give the upper management job to someone who has read Bleak House instead of to someone who has never read any Dickens or Shakespeare.
I'm a little tiny bit concerned, tho, that the loss of reading comprehension means a decay in the ability to process, understand and communicate complex ideas. On the other hand the ability to process, understand and communicate complex idea can also be taught by programming. Literacy is not the only way to do this.
Yet skills gained from literary fluency include empathy - as we get to immerse in understanding how another person might feel and think - and social analysis, when we read about people with complex conflicting motivation. I think people are getting worse at this - but I think they are getting worse at this because they are growing up in closed peer groups, and in families with few members. I think that the rigid age stratification that kids are subjected to is eroding our social skills more than the fact that they are watching videos instead of reading. After all watching videos does many teach social skills that reading doesn't, such as decoding expressions and body language.
I wonder how I would fare if I got dropped into watching the fourth film in a series that I had no familiarity with? I think I would do pretty badly. Dickens I can immerse in. But this is not surprising at all. My mother read Dickens to us as our bedtime stories, not just kids classics and The Lord of the Rings. Reading became my happy place. So now watching videos is too much work. I can read dialogue much faster than anyone can reasonably listen, so I get impatient and my attention wanders. I'm like the student readers who don't expect what they read to make sense. It feels like there isn't much content. I'm sure the content IS there. But when it comes to video I am struggling the way the students were when they read Bleak House.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:25 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...
Writing has evolved to where description is considered bad writing. If people want setting they will watch a video because you can see in a glance what it would take a writer five paragraphs to describe. But back in the day before videos, description was absolutely necessary to give the reader a setting. If you want to sell your writing now you have to leave the description out, unless you are aiming for the genre literary fiction. People don't want descriptive writing. It makes them impatient and feels like a digression. It doesn't work now in our culture. It's increasingly inaccessible.
Something to consider about writing done during Dicken's time is that your alternative was often what we would consider stultifying boredom. It was very common for the family to gather in the evening in an badly illuminated room and have one person sitting in the best light so they could read aloud. The alternative was to try to amuse each other by talking in the half light or possibly by having someone reread the Bible. The books that Dickens wrote came out as serials, so you would likely get one chapter a week. Another thing you could potentially do to break the boredom on the other five days is to invite people to dinner, choosing them by who was reputed to have had some interesting experiences they could recount. You could dine out on a good story, being invited by a couple of dozen different households over a period of weeks, on the understanding that you would amuse them by describing how you saw a bolting horse, or what you saw when you went to New York. You can see why Dickens wrote the way he did, if you know the context of who his audience was. It definitely wasn't your contemporary reader.
I don't think we will ever return to the era where high levels of literacy are widespread. There are too many competitors to complex detailed fiction, and not enough money available to publish detailed, highly textured books for widespread consumption. I won't say this is bad. Culture is used to sort us into our proper places, who belongs in our group and who has high status in it. The era when familiarity when English language novels were used to figure out who deserved a higher paying job is gone. There is absolutely no reason why they should give the upper management job to someone who has read Bleak House instead of to someone who has never read any Dickens or Shakespeare.
I'm a little tiny bit concerned, tho, that the loss of reading comprehension means a decay in the ability to process, understand and communicate complex ideas. On the other hand the ability to process, understand and communicate complex idea can also be taught by programming. Literacy is not the only way to do this.
Yet skills gained from literary fluency include empathy - as we get to immerse in understanding how another person might feel and think - and social analysis, when we read about people with complex conflicting motivation. I think people are getting worse at this - but I think they are getting worse at this because they are growing up in closed peer groups, and in families with few members. I think that the rigid age stratification that kids are subjected to is eroding our social skills more than the fact that they are watching videos instead of reading. After all watching videos does many teach social skills that reading doesn't, such as decoding expressions and body language.
I wonder how I would fare if I got dropped into watching the fourth film in a series that I had no familiarity with? I think I would do pretty badly. Dickens I can immerse in. But this is not surprising at all. My mother read Dickens to us as our bedtime stories, not just kids classics and The Lord of the Rings. Reading became my happy place. So now watching videos is too much work. I can read dialogue much faster than anyone can reasonably listen, so I get impatient and my attention wanders. I'm like the student readers who don't expect what they read to make sense. It feels like there isn't much content. I'm sure the content IS there. But when it comes to video I am struggling the way the students were when they read Bleak House.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:25 AM on May 13 [15 favorites]
This is really bad that English majors - people who have chosen to study English literature at university! - cannot do a close reading, or indeed a reading for literal meaning, on demand with any reference resources they want. This is really really bad.
As pointed out by the study these are dead average regional state university students so they aren’t really heavily selected on much besides some interest in English. The depressing result is that they don’t seem to have gotten much better over a couple of years of passing English classes.
posted by atoxyl at 10:25 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
As pointed out by the study these are dead average regional state university students so they aren’t really heavily selected on much besides some interest in English. The depressing result is that they don’t seem to have gotten much better over a couple of years of passing English classes.
posted by atoxyl at 10:25 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Can you not read? The underpants are clearly infinite.
The underpants are interminable, which suggests that they are finite, but hard to get through, which is probably not a thought you should be having about a cat's garments in court, unless you want to end up in a different court.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:26 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
The underpants are interminable, which suggests that they are finite, but hard to get through, which is probably not a thought you should be having about a cat's garments in court, unless you want to end up in a different court.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:26 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Claiming that somebody "can't read" because they have difficulty with a 175-year-old piece of literature is like claiming that they "can't drive" because they don't know how to hitch a horse to a buggy and convince it to pull them somewhere. This stuff is archaic and specialized, just because it's technically a similar skill doesn't mean it's the same task.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:29 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:29 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
(From a very rough skim of this thread there isn’t much correlation between STEM ?background?occupation? and scorning Dickens. I know I’m not the only nerd who enjoys 19th c novels as worldbuilding.)
posted by clew at 10:29 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
posted by clew at 10:29 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
If those kids could read this paper they'd be very upset.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:32 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:32 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
I'm a STEM-addled engineer with little in the way of an education in the humanities. I've yet to read any Dickens title cover to cover. And I could read those 7 paragraphs just fine. This is horrifying.
posted by ocschwar at 10:34 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 10:34 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
...and then retroactively update your understanding of what's going on.
That's why reading science fiction is so great. You learn to tolerate confusion while staying alert to clues that clarify everything retroactively.
posted by mono blanco at 10:34 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
That's why reading science fiction is so great. You learn to tolerate confusion while staying alert to clues that clarify everything retroactively.
posted by mono blanco at 10:34 AM on May 13 [9 favorites]
Here I'll sum up my apparently radical notion: an English major ought actually to be able to derive both literal and nonliteral meaning from a text such as Bleak House. Yes, even going one sentence at a time. It's not a wild expectation; students are frequently asked to "gloss" a text line by line in seminar.
Even if this study is poorly constructed, or not perfectly revelatory of one's entire breadth of reading comprehension, the task itself should have been more do-able than, it seems, it was for many participants. And I don't think it's wild for the tumblr post to conclude that something has definitely gone awry if this is the case.
I do not think the study is perfect, flawless, a beacon of science for all of mankind to behold. I think it illustrates something interesting, which in the context of other things I'm hearing from the world of higher ed (and my own actual profession, which is in K-12 ed) very much checks out.
My personal theory is that students are no longer exposed to a variety of texts in terms of style, era, intention, and difficulty. There's no time, and that's not what tests are testing. Students come to texts in college without a broad sense of what writing can do, and as such everything is much more opaque and unfamiliar to them than it should be at that point. They have not encountered enough figurative language in the wild; they have not encountered a wide variety of approaches to descriptive language. They haven't had to persevere through longer texts.
ADDITIONALLY, they really have not been taught strong reading fundamentals for pure literal comprehension, and what they have been taught, they haven't had the opportunity to practice.
As for why they persist through college then without improvement...I'll leave that to the higher ed folks but just whisper *student evaluations* in a menacing tone.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:34 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
Even if this study is poorly constructed, or not perfectly revelatory of one's entire breadth of reading comprehension, the task itself should have been more do-able than, it seems, it was for many participants. And I don't think it's wild for the tumblr post to conclude that something has definitely gone awry if this is the case.
I do not think the study is perfect, flawless, a beacon of science for all of mankind to behold. I think it illustrates something interesting, which in the context of other things I'm hearing from the world of higher ed (and my own actual profession, which is in K-12 ed) very much checks out.
My personal theory is that students are no longer exposed to a variety of texts in terms of style, era, intention, and difficulty. There's no time, and that's not what tests are testing. Students come to texts in college without a broad sense of what writing can do, and as such everything is much more opaque and unfamiliar to them than it should be at that point. They have not encountered enough figurative language in the wild; they have not encountered a wide variety of approaches to descriptive language. They haven't had to persevere through longer texts.
ADDITIONALLY, they really have not been taught strong reading fundamentals for pure literal comprehension, and what they have been taught, they haven't had the opportunity to practice.
As for why they persist through college then without improvement...I'll leave that to the higher ed folks but just whisper *student evaluations* in a menacing tone.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:34 AM on May 13 [17 favorites]
As for why they persist through college then without improvement...I'll leave that to the higher ed folks but just whisper *student evaluations* in a menacing tone.
Too true. Nobody in higher education has less leverage than the English professors. The facilities staff can "lose" keys in inopportune moments and make a student regret the day he was born. The IT staff can avenge any slight with a few moments at a keyboard. English profs are either adjunct or adjunct-ish, every last one.
posted by ocschwar at 10:39 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Too true. Nobody in higher education has less leverage than the English professors. The facilities staff can "lose" keys in inopportune moments and make a student regret the day he was born. The IT staff can avenge any slight with a few moments at a keyboard. English profs are either adjunct or adjunct-ish, every last one.
posted by ocschwar at 10:39 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Very little communication passed between the denizens of these outer quarters and those who lived within the walls, save when, on the first June morning of each year, the entire population of the clay dwellings had sanction to enter the Grounds in order to display the wooden carvings on which they had been working during the year. These carvings, blazoned in strange colour, were generally of animals or figures and were treated in a highly stylized manner peculiar to themselves. The competition among them to display the finest object of the year was bitter and rabid. Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture, and among the muddle of huts at the foot of the outer wall, existed a score of creative craftsmen whose position as leading carvers gave them pride of place among the shadows.
At one point within the Outer Wall, a few feet from the earth, the great stones of which the wall itself was constructed, jutted forward in the form of a massive shelf stretching from east to west for about two hundred to three hundred feet. These protruding stones were painted white, and it was upon this shelf that on the first morning of June the carvings were ranged every year for judgement by the Earl of Groan. Those works judged to be the most consummate, and there were never more than three chosen, were subsequently relegated to the Hall of the Bright Carvings.
Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their colour. The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy. The craftsmen stood about like beggars, their families clustered in silent groups. They were uncouth and prematurely aged. All radiance gone.
The carvings that were left unselected were burned the same evening in the courtyard below Lord Groan’s western balcony, and it was customary for him to stand there at the time of the burning and to bow his head silently as if in pain, and then as a gong beat thrice from within, the three carvings to escape the flames would be brought forth in the moonlight. They were stood upon the balustrade of the balcony in full view of the crowd below, and the Earl of Groan would call for their authors to come forward. When they had stationed themselves immediately beneath where he was standing, the Earl would throw down to them the traditional scrolls of vellum, which, as the writings upon them verified, permitted these men to walk the battlements above their cantonment at the full moon of each alternate month. On these particular nights, from a window in the southern wall of Gormenghast, an observer might watch the minute moonlit figures whose skill had won for them this honour which they so coveted, moving to and fro along the battlements.
Saving this exception of the day of carvings, and the latitude permitted to the most peerless, there was no other opportunity for those who lived within the walls to know of these ‘outer’ folk, nor in fact were they of interest to the ‘inner’ world, being submerged within the shadows of the great walls.
They were all-but forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream. The day of carvings alone brought them into the sunlight and reawakened the memory of former times. For as far back as even Nettel, the octogenarian who lived in the tower above the rusting armoury, could remember, the ceremony had been held. Innumerable carvings had smouldered to ashes in obedience to the law, but the choicest were still housed in the Hall of the Bright Carvings.
posted by flabdablet at 10:49 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
Very little communication passed between the denizens of these outer quarters and those who lived within the walls, save when, on the first June morning of each year, the entire population of the clay dwellings had sanction to enter the Grounds in order to display the wooden carvings on which they had been working during the year. These carvings, blazoned in strange colour, were generally of animals or figures and were treated in a highly stylized manner peculiar to themselves. The competition among them to display the finest object of the year was bitter and rabid. Their sole passion was directed, once their days of love had guttered, on the production of this wooden sculpture, and among the muddle of huts at the foot of the outer wall, existed a score of creative craftsmen whose position as leading carvers gave them pride of place among the shadows.
At one point within the Outer Wall, a few feet from the earth, the great stones of which the wall itself was constructed, jutted forward in the form of a massive shelf stretching from east to west for about two hundred to three hundred feet. These protruding stones were painted white, and it was upon this shelf that on the first morning of June the carvings were ranged every year for judgement by the Earl of Groan. Those works judged to be the most consummate, and there were never more than three chosen, were subsequently relegated to the Hall of the Bright Carvings.
Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their colour. The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy. The craftsmen stood about like beggars, their families clustered in silent groups. They were uncouth and prematurely aged. All radiance gone.
The carvings that were left unselected were burned the same evening in the courtyard below Lord Groan’s western balcony, and it was customary for him to stand there at the time of the burning and to bow his head silently as if in pain, and then as a gong beat thrice from within, the three carvings to escape the flames would be brought forth in the moonlight. They were stood upon the balustrade of the balcony in full view of the crowd below, and the Earl of Groan would call for their authors to come forward. When they had stationed themselves immediately beneath where he was standing, the Earl would throw down to them the traditional scrolls of vellum, which, as the writings upon them verified, permitted these men to walk the battlements above their cantonment at the full moon of each alternate month. On these particular nights, from a window in the southern wall of Gormenghast, an observer might watch the minute moonlit figures whose skill had won for them this honour which they so coveted, moving to and fro along the battlements.
Saving this exception of the day of carvings, and the latitude permitted to the most peerless, there was no other opportunity for those who lived within the walls to know of these ‘outer’ folk, nor in fact were they of interest to the ‘inner’ world, being submerged within the shadows of the great walls.
They were all-but forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream. The day of carvings alone brought them into the sunlight and reawakened the memory of former times. For as far back as even Nettel, the octogenarian who lived in the tower above the rusting armoury, could remember, the ceremony had been held. Innumerable carvings had smouldered to ashes in obedience to the law, but the choicest were still housed in the Hall of the Bright Carvings.
posted by flabdablet at 10:49 AM on May 13 [13 favorites]
There's an interesting contrast here to the once-common (maybe still common?) attitude that certain engineering courses are not meant for teaching, but for winnowing.
Give first-year students something hard, ideally taught by a mumbling professor with a barely understandable accent who clearly hates students and his job. Don't waste any more resources on students who can't survive that fire.
posted by clawsoon at 10:53 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Give first-year students something hard, ideally taught by a mumbling professor with a barely understandable accent who clearly hates students and his job. Don't waste any more resources on students who can't survive that fire.
posted by clawsoon at 10:53 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
As a reminder regarding the study: Yes, the subjects were all English majors, but they
came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon.And "Bleak House" was specifically chosen both because it can be difficult and because being able to read, parse, and teach it is a skill this cohort will be expected to eventually have:
Dickens’ novel worked we [sic!] as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting. In addition, Bleak House is a standard in college literature classes and, so, is important for English Education students, who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in high schools. Our assumption was that English majors, who study similar types of literature and are trained in poetic language, should be able to look up unfamiliar references and understand most of the literal meaning from this novel’s first paragraphs.posted by gwint at 10:55 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I have not RTFA nor all of these many comments, but I guess I am weird, cause I read Wuthering Heights (pub nearly 200 years ago...) at 12 or 13? it was difficult, primarily due to antiquated language, and the unusual narrative structure, but I was really determined to read it. And I did. Did I get ever nuance and reference? of course not. but I understood the book, the story, what happened, and what it meant, at least generally. I was compelled enough to have read it again. And Jane Eyre, and other stuff of that time, ilk, whatnot.
I never liked Dickens when I was required to read him in school but Bleak House was not one of the ones I read. So I just read the first seven paras and they are...funny? they paint a rich picture of a city full of mud and fog, and frustrated, grumpy people trying to get through the miserable day. a bunch of lawyers about their tedious and abstruse work. It kinda makes me want to read Bleak House.
I was educated in the 70s and 80s. I think children are being short-changed now, with teaching methods so pinned to test scores and metrics, instead of learning how to read, engage, enjoy, understand, for the sake of it, not just for ticking a box for funding requirements. It's too bad. but then again I am a big bookworm nerd and no one ever had to prod me into reading.
there are lots of great things written well before the early 20th century!! Chaucer is a hoot, but yeah you have to struggle with 600+ year old language, vocab etc., Shakespeare is a hoot and a half!! the opening scene in Julius Caesar is Laugh Out LoudTM funny. but yeah, it's challenging. lots of things are worth the effort, if you want them.
posted by supermedusa at 10:57 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
I never liked Dickens when I was required to read him in school but Bleak House was not one of the ones I read. So I just read the first seven paras and they are...funny? they paint a rich picture of a city full of mud and fog, and frustrated, grumpy people trying to get through the miserable day. a bunch of lawyers about their tedious and abstruse work. It kinda makes me want to read Bleak House.
I was educated in the 70s and 80s. I think children are being short-changed now, with teaching methods so pinned to test scores and metrics, instead of learning how to read, engage, enjoy, understand, for the sake of it, not just for ticking a box for funding requirements. It's too bad. but then again I am a big bookworm nerd and no one ever had to prod me into reading.
there are lots of great things written well before the early 20th century!! Chaucer is a hoot, but yeah you have to struggle with 600+ year old language, vocab etc., Shakespeare is a hoot and a half!! the opening scene in Julius Caesar is Laugh Out LoudTM funny. but yeah, it's challenging. lots of things are worth the effort, if you want them.
posted by supermedusa at 10:57 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
For our next experiment, we're going to have a group of 6th-form students from Burnley cold-read the opening paragraphs of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.
(stop sniggering back there- that's not what they mean by "erection")
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:59 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
(stop sniggering back there- that's not what they mean by "erection")
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:59 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
English profs are either adjunct or adjunct-ish, every last one.
We have encountered very different English departments.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:59 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
We have encountered very different English departments.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:59 AM on May 13 [2 favorites]
LONDON. Twas brillig, and Michaelmas Term did gyre and gimble in Lincoln's Inn Hall: All mimsy was the weather, and the mome raths outgrabe. Beware the Megalosaurus, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that waddle! Beware the chimney-pots, and shun the frumious lizard up Holborn-hill!
posted by gwint at 11:01 AM on May 13 [18 favorites]
posted by gwint at 11:01 AM on May 13 [18 favorites]
I share the authors concerns about the English teachers of tomorrow (or, really, of today, since I left university nearly 20 years ago) only for the reason that, in my English classes, the education majors were always the worst students compared the the "regular," non-education English majors.
posted by asnider at 11:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
posted by asnider at 11:01 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Here I'll sum up my apparently radical notion: an English major ought actually to be able to derive both literal and nonliteral meaning from a text such as Bleak House. Yes, even going one sentence at a time.
I learned to read pre-smartphone so I wouldn’t have thought to look up the English court stuff in the first sentence. I would have plowed ahead hoping it would become clear contextually, and indeed in the fourth paragraph it gets around to saying that Chancery is a court and the Lord High Chancellor presides over it. Similarly, the metaphorical implication of the fog starts out, uh, foggy, but is really hammered home in the fourth and fifth paragraphs. I give the authors of the study the benefit of the doubt and assume they ultimately gauged understanding of these details at the end of the passage, not just line by line, but it wasn’t completely clear to me by the way they wrote it up, since they are citing shorter excerpts in discussing the student responses.
posted by atoxyl at 11:02 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
I learned to read pre-smartphone so I wouldn’t have thought to look up the English court stuff in the first sentence. I would have plowed ahead hoping it would become clear contextually, and indeed in the fourth paragraph it gets around to saying that Chancery is a court and the Lord High Chancellor presides over it. Similarly, the metaphorical implication of the fog starts out, uh, foggy, but is really hammered home in the fourth and fifth paragraphs. I give the authors of the study the benefit of the doubt and assume they ultimately gauged understanding of these details at the end of the passage, not just line by line, but it wasn’t completely clear to me by the way they wrote it up, since they are citing shorter excerpts in discussing the student responses.
posted by atoxyl at 11:02 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
why in hell would you sign up for a degree in English if you aren't up to speed with this shit? It's like signing up for a chemistry degree without knowing how the periodic table works.
You have to sign up for *some* kind of degree if you’re not already on the vocational track, because that’s how credentialism works.
posted by toodleydoodley at 11:05 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
You have to sign up for *some* kind of degree if you’re not already on the vocational track, because that’s how credentialism works.
posted by toodleydoodley at 11:05 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Jane Jacobs wrote a book called Dark Age Ahead and in it she specifically calls out the tendency to emphasize credentialing over education as a driving force behind the (let me gesture all around me) that she prophesied.
posted by ocschwar at 11:09 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 11:09 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
As for why they persist through college then without improvement...I'll leave that to the higher ed folks but just whisper *student evaluations* in a menacing tone.
Nobody gives a shit about student evaluations except as a way to get rid of profs who are Causing Problems with their femininity or brownfulness.
I'm not sure what you mean by "why they persist."
If you're asking why they're allowed to continue with little improvement, then there are a couple of answers.
One is a broader answer about a distinction between grant-driven fields and disciplines that are basically funded by student asses in seats. Chem or physics can to a first approximation get away with just not giving a shit about their students and letting some huge chunk of interested students fail because they don't need more than the small skim of easiest-to-teach students at the top of their performance distribution. English can't do that; if they don't actually try to reach students where they are and do the best they can with whatever students they're presented with, then their department folds.
A second answer is that the sorts of students described here -- somewhere near an average where the low end is "really really shouldn't attempt college at all," showing up with at best middling preparation and probably not terribly prepared or interested in improving their skills -- are exactly why nonflagship state universities exist. Doing their best with the kids who didn't get into KU or K-State, along with some mix of people who for whatever reason felt like that couldn't spend years in Manhattan or Lawrence, is the whole purpose of these places.
If you mean why do the students continue instead of just leaving, it's because a degree with a bunch of C's from a directional state university still opens lots of doors in life. Double extra especially for people who don't think they're male enough and white enough and straight enough to have a go at the unionized trades.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:11 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Nobody gives a shit about student evaluations except as a way to get rid of profs who are Causing Problems with their femininity or brownfulness.
I'm not sure what you mean by "why they persist."
If you're asking why they're allowed to continue with little improvement, then there are a couple of answers.
One is a broader answer about a distinction between grant-driven fields and disciplines that are basically funded by student asses in seats. Chem or physics can to a first approximation get away with just not giving a shit about their students and letting some huge chunk of interested students fail because they don't need more than the small skim of easiest-to-teach students at the top of their performance distribution. English can't do that; if they don't actually try to reach students where they are and do the best they can with whatever students they're presented with, then their department folds.
A second answer is that the sorts of students described here -- somewhere near an average where the low end is "really really shouldn't attempt college at all," showing up with at best middling preparation and probably not terribly prepared or interested in improving their skills -- are exactly why nonflagship state universities exist. Doing their best with the kids who didn't get into KU or K-State, along with some mix of people who for whatever reason felt like that couldn't spend years in Manhattan or Lawrence, is the whole purpose of these places.
If you mean why do the students continue instead of just leaving, it's because a degree with a bunch of C's from a directional state university still opens lots of doors in life. Double extra especially for people who don't think they're male enough and white enough and straight enough to have a go at the unionized trades.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:11 AM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Inability to make inferences or follow several paragraphs of prose isn't inconsistent with (gesturing also). Bleak House isn't harder than the marketing and politics and health-care contracts we're all expected to deal with.
Might help with the health-care contracts, even.
posted by clew at 11:13 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Might help with the health-care contracts, even.
posted by clew at 11:13 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
So let me get this straight, these 3 senior academics who have presumably devoted a good portion of their lives to education took 9 years to publish the results of their study?
From my perspective, this has to reflect on how they originally perceived the importance of their results. There may have been extenuating circumstances that delayed their progress, but in science timeliness does have importance. Aside from the need for knowledge to be disseminated in a timely manor so that it can actually be acted on, the time gap between data acquisition and publication makes me doubt the rigor of the experiment and analysis. I myself am reluctant to revive old experimental data because I know how flawed memory can be regarding experimental conditions. We try to write everything down, but there are always some elusive details that get missed.
posted by wigner3j at 11:14 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
From my perspective, this has to reflect on how they originally perceived the importance of their results. There may have been extenuating circumstances that delayed their progress, but in science timeliness does have importance. Aside from the need for knowledge to be disseminated in a timely manor so that it can actually be acted on, the time gap between data acquisition and publication makes me doubt the rigor of the experiment and analysis. I myself am reluctant to revive old experimental data because I know how flawed memory can be regarding experimental conditions. We try to write everything down, but there are always some elusive details that get missed.
posted by wigner3j at 11:14 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Practical Criticism by I.A. Richards came out in 1929, and he found pretty much the same thing: plenty of English majors cannot actually construe the text that's in front of them. I believe close reading was adopted as a pedagogical technique in order to teach them how to do it.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:15 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:15 AM on May 13 [10 favorites]
Picking a passage as orotund, archaic, and out of context as the first page of goddamn Bleak House really feels like setting the test to reach a predetermined conclusion.
These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them.
Very jarring to see “chill” in that sentence and hard not to read it with an anachronistic sense.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:15 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them.
Very jarring to see “chill” in that sentence and hard not to read it with an anachronistic sense.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 11:15 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
took 9 years to publish the results of their study
Some of those students might be English professors by now.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:22 AM on May 13
Some of those students might be English professors by now.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:22 AM on May 13
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
I knew what these were, but that's because I am literally ABD in pre-modern English history and had to use legal records in my research. I had no idea what Michaelmas or Michaelmas term was before I started that research.
I also guessed wrong on what a "Lord Chancellor" was - I thought it was referring to a high political figure (which, apparently, it also does) - and I thought the waters retreating (and dinosaur) was a reference to Noah's flood, but really it's a reference to a mismash of biblical creation and nineteenth century paleontology.
This was a very difficult text to start them on in terms of alien cultural knowledge - it's about a place sufficiently far enough away in both time and space that no one alive would have seen it (not without a police box, at least). I think I would have done this research with a text which might be challenging but was at least contemporary and more culturally familiar.*
BUT that doesn't mean that the issues identified - that the students will try to guess from the few familiar things and aren't really reading the text - those are real. They remind me of the "three-cueing" method (villain of the Sold a Story podcast) and how they had picked up on the techniques poor readers use on simpler texts.
*I do wonder if having read Tolkien and other science fiction and fantasy is good training for historic literature, since the reader has to get used to having little to no idea of what the world looks like and figuring out everything from the text: "Ge'esebal laid the snorfle aside and took a deep breath. She was never going to master the enuwondon, not before Blaisal-rise at least."
posted by jb at 11:30 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I knew what these were, but that's because I am literally ABD in pre-modern English history and had to use legal records in my research. I had no idea what Michaelmas or Michaelmas term was before I started that research.
I also guessed wrong on what a "Lord Chancellor" was - I thought it was referring to a high political figure (which, apparently, it also does) - and I thought the waters retreating (and dinosaur) was a reference to Noah's flood, but really it's a reference to a mismash of biblical creation and nineteenth century paleontology.
This was a very difficult text to start them on in terms of alien cultural knowledge - it's about a place sufficiently far enough away in both time and space that no one alive would have seen it (not without a police box, at least). I think I would have done this research with a text which might be challenging but was at least contemporary and more culturally familiar.*
BUT that doesn't mean that the issues identified - that the students will try to guess from the few familiar things and aren't really reading the text - those are real. They remind me of the "three-cueing" method (villain of the Sold a Story podcast) and how they had picked up on the techniques poor readers use on simpler texts.
*I do wonder if having read Tolkien and other science fiction and fantasy is good training for historic literature, since the reader has to get used to having little to no idea of what the world looks like and figuring out everything from the text: "Ge'esebal laid the snorfle aside and took a deep breath. She was never going to master the enuwondon, not before Blaisal-rise at least."
posted by jb at 11:30 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I give the authors of the study the benefit of the doubt and assume they ultimately gauged understanding of these details at the end of the passage, not just line by line, but it wasn’t completely clear to me by the way they wrote it up
This is where I come down. I would have fully understood the passages by the end but I would not have gotten a bunch of it immediately and would not have stopped to look things up. I assume I would have been judged as a fully proficient reader but who knows.
That said, a lot of the defenses of the students seems misplaced to me given they are majors in English Literature. It reads like defending a math major who can't do middle-difficulty math. Like an English Lit major should be able to read English Literature and comprehend it.
posted by Justinian at 11:33 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
This is where I come down. I would have fully understood the passages by the end but I would not have gotten a bunch of it immediately and would not have stopped to look things up. I assume I would have been judged as a fully proficient reader but who knows.
That said, a lot of the defenses of the students seems misplaced to me given they are majors in English Literature. It reads like defending a math major who can't do middle-difficulty math. Like an English Lit major should be able to read English Literature and comprehend it.
posted by Justinian at 11:33 AM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I made the same leap to SF&F being good training to reading historical fiction, jb! I'm used to and fully expect to come across references and words which will only make sense later. (That said, I still don't think 'Michaelmas' is particularly obscure).
posted by Justinian at 11:34 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
posted by Justinian at 11:34 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Only when you get to the fourth paragraph do you get your first hint that actually that wasn't just a random scene-setting detail, meaningful to contemporary audiences but skippable by you
Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, I think it's also the fourth paragraph where you encounter the first complete sentence.
posted by nickmark at 11:35 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, I think it's also the fourth paragraph where you encounter the first complete sentence.
posted by nickmark at 11:35 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
students are frequently asked to "gloss" a text line by line in seminar.
On first reading? That seems of dubious value.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:47 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
On first reading? That seems of dubious value.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:47 AM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Something to consider about writing done during Dicken's time is that your alternative was often what we would consider stultifying boredom. It was very common for the family to gather in the evening in an badly illuminated room and have one person sitting in the best light so they could read aloud. The alternative was to try to amuse each other by talking in the half light or possibly by having someone reread the Bible.
Oh, it wasn't quite so bad as that- at least, not in the cities and larger towns. By the second half of the 19th-century, public houses, theaters, and music halls were frequented by all classes, newspapers and magazines were being published in great numbers (and literacy in England was the highest it had been since the Roman era), and typically one or more members of a household could play an instrument or sing passably.
Now, if you had told me this was the western New York frontier in the 1830s, you might have something.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:49 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
Oh, it wasn't quite so bad as that- at least, not in the cities and larger towns. By the second half of the 19th-century, public houses, theaters, and music halls were frequented by all classes, newspapers and magazines were being published in great numbers (and literacy in England was the highest it had been since the Roman era), and typically one or more members of a household could play an instrument or sing passably.
Now, if you had told me this was the western New York frontier in the 1830s, you might have something.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:49 AM on May 13 [6 favorites]
One thing I noticed when I was, like, twelve is that anything written before the 1920s or so is difficult and tedious to read.
I think this is more about what you've been exposed to. Just like how a kid who has never eaten spices will have a lower tolerance than one who has been raised with them, the dialects of English that you are comfortable reading will change with your exposure. When I was 12, I had already read many novels written before the 1930s - like the Little Women series (first one published in 1868-1869) and L.M. Montgomery novels (written between 1908 and 1937). BUT this wasn't out of nowhere - I had started with the Little House books (positively modern, what with being published in 1932) and other modern books set in the past (like Sarah Plain and Tall - 1986) as well as mid-century British books (Narnia) which had a different vocabulary than I used in my own life (I had never before even heard of a wardrobe, let alone a "torch" to mean a flashlight).
What I would not have been able to read might have been a novel written in AAVE or set in contemporary India or otherwise in a language and setting I hadn't eased myself into.
I've heard John McWhorter claim that modern American audiences don't really understand Shakespeare when it's performed - which, when I poll Canadians, seems strange. We struggle to read it, but the performances often make the text clearer. But maybe our diialect is just that little bit closer?
posted by jb at 11:59 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I think this is more about what you've been exposed to. Just like how a kid who has never eaten spices will have a lower tolerance than one who has been raised with them, the dialects of English that you are comfortable reading will change with your exposure. When I was 12, I had already read many novels written before the 1930s - like the Little Women series (first one published in 1868-1869) and L.M. Montgomery novels (written between 1908 and 1937). BUT this wasn't out of nowhere - I had started with the Little House books (positively modern, what with being published in 1932) and other modern books set in the past (like Sarah Plain and Tall - 1986) as well as mid-century British books (Narnia) which had a different vocabulary than I used in my own life (I had never before even heard of a wardrobe, let alone a "torch" to mean a flashlight).
What I would not have been able to read might have been a novel written in AAVE or set in contemporary India or otherwise in a language and setting I hadn't eased myself into.
I've heard John McWhorter claim that modern American audiences don't really understand Shakespeare when it's performed - which, when I poll Canadians, seems strange. We struggle to read it, but the performances often make the text clearer. But maybe our diialect is just that little bit closer?
posted by jb at 11:59 AM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I learned to read pre-smartphone so I wouldn’t have thought to look up the English court stuff
I learned to read pre-television.
Australia got its first proper broadcast TV station in 1956. I was born in 1962, but because the considered opinion of my parents - both of whom were high school teachers - was that ready access to TV was clearly antithetical to kids' motivation and opportunity to practice reading, they refused to buy one until after the youngest of us started high school in 1977.
Before then, they'd hire a set every four years for the Olympic Games coverage, during which periods I would get up at five in the morning every day to watch cartoons before Mum and Dad woke up, but that plus occasional sessions at friends' houses after school or on visits to Grandma's was the extent of my exposure to it. And as a result I did read for a hell of a lot more hours than any of my school peers, for which I remain intensely grateful. Thanks, Mum.
In 2004 I got a job as a local primary school's IT technician. Quite a lot of that role involved sitting in the back of classrooms fiddling about with the computers, so I got to watch a lot of classroom teaching, and frankly I was gobsmacked at what a manifestly poor grasp many of the younger teachers had of the literacy skills they were entrusted with passing on to the kids. And it occurred to me then that these teachers were from the first generation whose own teachers would have grown up with TV, and that what I was seeing was exactly the kind of literacy competence corrosion that my parents had anticipated and helped me sidestep.
The US has had TV for roughly a generation longer than Australia, so I find it entirely unsurprising that the corrosion is worse over there. Compound lack of interest is a hell of a thing.
posted by flabdablet at 12:00 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
I learned to read pre-television.
Australia got its first proper broadcast TV station in 1956. I was born in 1962, but because the considered opinion of my parents - both of whom were high school teachers - was that ready access to TV was clearly antithetical to kids' motivation and opportunity to practice reading, they refused to buy one until after the youngest of us started high school in 1977.
Before then, they'd hire a set every four years for the Olympic Games coverage, during which periods I would get up at five in the morning every day to watch cartoons before Mum and Dad woke up, but that plus occasional sessions at friends' houses after school or on visits to Grandma's was the extent of my exposure to it. And as a result I did read for a hell of a lot more hours than any of my school peers, for which I remain intensely grateful. Thanks, Mum.
In 2004 I got a job as a local primary school's IT technician. Quite a lot of that role involved sitting in the back of classrooms fiddling about with the computers, so I got to watch a lot of classroom teaching, and frankly I was gobsmacked at what a manifestly poor grasp many of the younger teachers had of the literacy skills they were entrusted with passing on to the kids. And it occurred to me then that these teachers were from the first generation whose own teachers would have grown up with TV, and that what I was seeing was exactly the kind of literacy competence corrosion that my parents had anticipated and helped me sidestep.
The US has had TV for roughly a generation longer than Australia, so I find it entirely unsurprising that the corrosion is worse over there. Compound lack of interest is a hell of a thing.
posted by flabdablet at 12:00 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
[I've only read about the first 1/4 of the comments, so forgive me if I repeat something]
I've taught literature to college students since before the turn of the century. These are nearly always upper-level elective classes, often within the "honors track", so, self-selected for reading nerds with the occasional STEM student who needed an elective. I have had to, over the course of the years, reduce the total number of pages read by a little more than half, and I *still* get all kinds of complaints about "I didn't have time to read this". When I follow up, it inevitably turns out to be a) students will not put down their phones or social media and just read the book, and/or b) their reading experiences are overwhelmingly "read this eight-paragraph article and answer stoopid standardized test questions about it".
About ten years ago, I started making the first day of class about "how to read". This is a 2-page PDF with things that most people here will likely find self-evident: get comfortable but not too comfortable, put the goddamn phone in the other room, have a notepad and pen so you can write down your observations. We go through this, then we all collectively read the first four pages of William Gibson's Neuromancer, over the course of about 90 minutes. What the hell is a "dead channel" and why does Gibson describe the sky that way? What did "dead channel" mean when he wrote it in 1981 and what does it mean now? What does that tell us about who creates meaning from a text? What's a metaphor and why do we use them? Look at all these completely unfamiliar terms and learn to understand that they'll either be explained or they're mostly window dressing, so don't waste time looking them up except sometimes when you're still baffled. What do we learn about Case? How is it expressed? What is this world like? Now let's read it again: you always have to read a good book at least twice.
To their everlasting credit, the students are overwhelmingly happy about this. Nearly all of them will say something along the lines of "I had no idea this is how I was supposed to read". or "I wish I had learned this in high school". Almost to a person, they experience extreme anxiety about being cut off from the Internet and social media for even half an hour, but they're generally willing to admit that this is kind of a problem. I've tweaked it recently by insisting they buy and read the paper book instead of a digital version, purely so that they're not tempted to have other apps or tabs open on their tablet. One student was like "OMG, was this what the Eighties were like, Dr. Hobnail? You didn't have anything else to do and just sat there and read a book?" Yes, my child, for hours at a time. I still do; you're missing out.
The most recent issue has been that many students, citing lack of time, have taken to listening to the audiobook version instead of reading—I also think this has to do with the anxiety generated by just sitting there reading a book with nothing else to do. I still haven't sorted out entirely how I feel about this: it seems fairly clear that just listening results in less comprehension than reading, but how much and why is opaque.
With respect to the test in the article, it's terrible. It's testing for knowledge of 19C British vocabulary and customs, not actual reading comprehension. Give students the whole first chapter and THEN ask them to summarize it in modern English, and you'll see dramatically better results.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:01 PM on May 13 [33 favorites]
I've taught literature to college students since before the turn of the century. These are nearly always upper-level elective classes, often within the "honors track", so, self-selected for reading nerds with the occasional STEM student who needed an elective. I have had to, over the course of the years, reduce the total number of pages read by a little more than half, and I *still* get all kinds of complaints about "I didn't have time to read this". When I follow up, it inevitably turns out to be a) students will not put down their phones or social media and just read the book, and/or b) their reading experiences are overwhelmingly "read this eight-paragraph article and answer stoopid standardized test questions about it".
About ten years ago, I started making the first day of class about "how to read". This is a 2-page PDF with things that most people here will likely find self-evident: get comfortable but not too comfortable, put the goddamn phone in the other room, have a notepad and pen so you can write down your observations. We go through this, then we all collectively read the first four pages of William Gibson's Neuromancer, over the course of about 90 minutes. What the hell is a "dead channel" and why does Gibson describe the sky that way? What did "dead channel" mean when he wrote it in 1981 and what does it mean now? What does that tell us about who creates meaning from a text? What's a metaphor and why do we use them? Look at all these completely unfamiliar terms and learn to understand that they'll either be explained or they're mostly window dressing, so don't waste time looking them up except sometimes when you're still baffled. What do we learn about Case? How is it expressed? What is this world like? Now let's read it again: you always have to read a good book at least twice.
To their everlasting credit, the students are overwhelmingly happy about this. Nearly all of them will say something along the lines of "I had no idea this is how I was supposed to read". or "I wish I had learned this in high school". Almost to a person, they experience extreme anxiety about being cut off from the Internet and social media for even half an hour, but they're generally willing to admit that this is kind of a problem. I've tweaked it recently by insisting they buy and read the paper book instead of a digital version, purely so that they're not tempted to have other apps or tabs open on their tablet. One student was like "OMG, was this what the Eighties were like, Dr. Hobnail? You didn't have anything else to do and just sat there and read a book?" Yes, my child, for hours at a time. I still do; you're missing out.
The most recent issue has been that many students, citing lack of time, have taken to listening to the audiobook version instead of reading—I also think this has to do with the anxiety generated by just sitting there reading a book with nothing else to do. I still haven't sorted out entirely how I feel about this: it seems fairly clear that just listening results in less comprehension than reading, but how much and why is opaque.
With respect to the test in the article, it's terrible. It's testing for knowledge of 19C British vocabulary and customs, not actual reading comprehension. Give students the whole first chapter and THEN ask them to summarize it in modern English, and you'll see dramatically better results.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:01 PM on May 13 [33 favorites]
Are we really this blind to the "kids today" hand-wringing that literally every single generation does when it's convinced that culture is being adapted, not replicated directly?
And don't get me started on the article's authors not knowing how to write an abstract, let alone choosing a methodology that does what they want it to.
I'm open to actual evidence that actual students are actually incapable of doing something meaningful, but this is not that.
posted by yellowcandy at 12:01 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
And don't get me started on the article's authors not knowing how to write an abstract, let alone choosing a methodology that does what they want it to.
I'm open to actual evidence that actual students are actually incapable of doing something meaningful, but this is not that.
posted by yellowcandy at 12:01 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Frowner: "The more attentively you read old books, the weirder the past gets, and the weirder the past gets, the more the future can open up."
This is a beautifully-expressed, extremely insightful sentiment. It's something i've been noticing a lot in the past while because i've been on a golden-age-to-midcentury crime fiction kick for months now. It's the dreaded "genre fiction", and therefore by and large not "great literature" (although Dorothy Sayers, for one, is absolutely an exception to the rule), but reading a lot of it definitely gives you the same feeling: that the past is both extremely normal and extremely weird, in ways that open up more understanding of history and humanity.
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:03 PM on May 13 [17 favorites]
This is a beautifully-expressed, extremely insightful sentiment. It's something i've been noticing a lot in the past while because i've been on a golden-age-to-midcentury crime fiction kick for months now. It's the dreaded "genre fiction", and therefore by and large not "great literature" (although Dorothy Sayers, for one, is absolutely an exception to the rule), but reading a lot of it definitely gives you the same feeling: that the past is both extremely normal and extremely weird, in ways that open up more understanding of history and humanity.
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:03 PM on May 13 [17 favorites]
Hollywood cannot live up to the power of imagination
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 12:06 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Ugh, this is all so depressing. The study obviously has its flaws, but an English major--even an aspiring English major--ought to:
1) Realize that if a text is alien to your experience, that's potentially exciting rather than just frustrating.
2) Make a mental note of stuff you don't understand and see if it becomes clear later on instead of just giving up.
3) See unfamiliar allusions not just as obstacles but opportunities. Flood waters receding? What's that about? More stories to read!
4) Not only parse the line-by-line meaning but recognize the bigger picture. For example, a big block of description isn't something you'd usually see in contemporary literature. Instead of just deciding it must be skippable, ask some questions about why it's different. It's not just that Dickens was paid by the word. This stuff was popular. People had different ideas about what was entertaining. That's interesting! And even better, maybe this is a chance to stretch your own ideas about aesthetic value and enjoy new things.
If this sort of stuff isn't fun for you, why are you even English majoring?
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 12:07 PM on May 13 [11 favorites]
1) Realize that if a text is alien to your experience, that's potentially exciting rather than just frustrating.
2) Make a mental note of stuff you don't understand and see if it becomes clear later on instead of just giving up.
3) See unfamiliar allusions not just as obstacles but opportunities. Flood waters receding? What's that about? More stories to read!
4) Not only parse the line-by-line meaning but recognize the bigger picture. For example, a big block of description isn't something you'd usually see in contemporary literature. Instead of just deciding it must be skippable, ask some questions about why it's different. It's not just that Dickens was paid by the word. This stuff was popular. People had different ideas about what was entertaining. That's interesting! And even better, maybe this is a chance to stretch your own ideas about aesthetic value and enjoy new things.
If this sort of stuff isn't fun for you, why are you even English majoring?
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 12:07 PM on May 13 [11 favorites]
I've pushed the boundary of what I find easy and enjoyable to read back as far as Austen, but that wasn't an easy or quick process.
I recommend skipping anything the least bit elite or literary (Alexander Pope? who cares!) and go straight to Daniel Defoe. Read something like Moll Flanders and approach it like you might a crazy tumbler blog/memoir by someone who really doesn't like ending their sentences:
I recommend skipping anything the least bit elite or literary (Alexander Pope? who cares!) and go straight to Daniel Defoe. Read something like Moll Flanders and approach it like you might a crazy tumbler blog/memoir by someone who really doesn't like ending their sentences:
My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not be expected I should set my name or the account of my family toposted by jb at 12:08 PM on May 13 [6 favorites]
this work; perhaps, after my death, it may be better known; at present it would not be proper, no not though a general pardon should be issued, even without exceptions and reserve of persons or crimes.
It is enough to tell you, that as some of my worst comrades, who are out of the way of doing me harm (having gone out of the world by the steps and the string, as I often expected to go), knew me by the name of Moll Flanders, so you may give me leave to speak of myself under
that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.
I have been told that in one of our neighbour nations, whether it be in France or where else I know not, they have an order from the king, that when any criminal is condemned, either to die, or to the galleys, or to be transported, if they leave any children, as such are generally unprovided for, by the poverty or forfeiture of their parents, so they are immediately taken into the care of the Government, and put into a hospital called the House of Orphans, where they are bred up, clothed,
fed, taught, and when fit to go out, are placed out to trades or to services, so as to be well able to provide for themselves by an honest, industrious behaviour.
Had this been the custom in our country, I had not been left a poor desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper in the world, as was my fate; and by which I was not only exposed to very great distresses, even before I was capable either of understanding my case or how to amend it, but brought into a course of life which was not only scandalous in itself, but which in its ordinary course tended to the swift destruction both of soul and body.
But the case was otherwise here. My mother was convicted of felony for a certain petty theft scarce worth naming, viz. having an opportunity of borrowing three pieces of fine holland of a certain draper in Cheapside. The circumstances are too long to repeat, and I have heard them related so many ways, that I can scarce be certain which is the right account.
However it was, this they all agree in, that my mother pleaded her belly, and being found quick with child, she was respited for about seven months; in which time having brought me into the world, and being about again, she was called down, as they term it, to her former judgment, but obtained the favour of being transported to the plantations, and left me about half a year old; and in bad hands, you may be sure."
I'd be delighted to read a bunch of English professors close-reading modern slang. Though honestly I thought "Suggestive rap song: Fancy interpretive framework (with pun)" was a standard at MLA long since.
What I found, lazy searching, was a lesson plan for having students read old slang, and modern slang, and recent articles *complaining* about modern slang, and think about slang and do a telephone-game with definitions. Honestly it sounds like fun.
posted by clew at 12:08 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
What I found, lazy searching, was a lesson plan for having students read old slang, and modern slang, and recent articles *complaining* about modern slang, and think about slang and do a telephone-game with definitions. Honestly it sounds like fun.
posted by clew at 12:08 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
1) Realize that if a text is alien to your experience, that's potentially exciting rather than just frustrating.I don't disagree, but there's also a part of me that wants to give these students a little more benefit of the doubt. I suspect that if I were one of the students in this study, the setting would have triggered a fair bit of anxiety and insecurity on my part, amping up the frustration and decreasing my ability to summon some grit. And even in the best circumstances - the frustration and the excitement exist alongside one another. The obstacles and the opportunities exist alongside one another. I don't think that I'm a bad reader because I found Baudrillard and Natsume Soseki frustrating AND exciting at the same time. I'm sure I would have expressed a lot more frustration than excitement at the moment of struggling through the text! (Anyone who knew me in 2001, when I was in Japan and struggling through both premodern and modern literature, can vouch for this.)
2) Make a mental note of stuff you don't understand and see if it becomes clear later on instead of just giving up.
3) See unfamiliar allusions not just as obstacles but opportunities. Flood waters receding? What's that about? More stories to read!
posted by Jeanne at 12:24 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Please recall that these subjects were allowed to look up things like "Michaelmas Term" on their phones while doing this exercise. No one was expecting them to know what time of year Michaelmas Term ends off the top of the dome. One of the skills of successful readers was looking up terms and then being able to put that meaning back into the sentence they were having trouble with. Also, subjects were not required to read just one sentence at a time before explaining it in their own words. Plus, they didn't have to read aloud if they didn't want to. And, yeah, they did get dinged for just being like, "November in London is cold, wet, and muddy" because the subjects were English or English Education majors, getting A's and B's in those classes, and mostly upper-level students to boot!
Just look at the example of the "competent reader":
Link to the paper:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
posted by icebergs at 12:32 PM on May 13 [6 favorites]
Just look at the example of the "competent reader":
Original Text:Is it really "clickbait" to describe someone — specifically an upper-level 3.5-ish GPA English major — who misinterpreted that paragraph that badly as functionally unable to read!? Jesus wept!
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down . . .
Facilitator:
Before you go on, I’m going to ask you to kind of explain.
Subject:
Oh, O.K.
Facilitator:
what you read so far, so.
Subject:
O.K. Two characters it’s pointed out this Michaelmas and Lord Chancellor described as sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Facilitator:
O.K.
Subject:
Um, talk about the November weather. Uh, mud in the streets. And, uh, I do probably need to look up “Megolasaurus”— “meet a Megolasaurus, forty feet long or so,” so it’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street. yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street.
Link to the paper:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346
posted by icebergs at 12:32 PM on May 13 [6 favorites]
Holy fuck, so much thread. I cannot even scan it all, sorry.
I have not got to the tumblr thing yet (and maybe I won't, what with tumblr refusing to let me use my screen to read with unless I make an account, and what with tumblr writer being all ee cummings with their prose).
But it's really striking that only 2/3 of the study population (composed almost entirely of what used to be called upperclassmen, i.e. people within 2 years of graduation!) are competent to read at 10th-grade level. You can get all the way to the end of a program in English, without the reading proficiency that a HS grad is supposed to have.
This feeds into my general conviction that as a people, Americans have always been dumb AF by and large. I mean, I have seen Sunday newspaper features from the 1920s bemoaning the historical ignorance of the HS grads of the day, who could not name the dates of the war with Spain (which would be like a '90s kid not knowing when 'Nam happened) or when was the Civil War.
Anyway, to the thread: one thing I caught was a critique of the methodology based on the obscurity and difficulty of the passage, to which I call BS. People were allowed to use any reference they wanted, including their phones, which even back in 2015 could connect with Wikipedia so that they could figure out what exactly Michaelmas is, if they really can't guess. I mean, they say right up front that the presumption is that people will have the kind of reading skills that would correspond to having a score of 33-36 on the Reading section of the ACT. Maybe my POV is distorted because my ACT score back in the day was already there, but the fact remains, competence to score like that is supposed to be what the BA in English is supposed to produce, and it is fair to ask of 3rd and 4th year undergrads whether they are making progress in that direction. And I say the passage is a fair test of how well I can understand and explain obscure archaic English-language utterances.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:33 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I have not got to the tumblr thing yet (and maybe I won't, what with tumblr refusing to let me use my screen to read with unless I make an account, and what with tumblr writer being all ee cummings with their prose).
But it's really striking that only 2/3 of the study population (composed almost entirely of what used to be called upperclassmen, i.e. people within 2 years of graduation!) are competent to read at 10th-grade level. You can get all the way to the end of a program in English, without the reading proficiency that a HS grad is supposed to have.
This feeds into my general conviction that as a people, Americans have always been dumb AF by and large. I mean, I have seen Sunday newspaper features from the 1920s bemoaning the historical ignorance of the HS grads of the day, who could not name the dates of the war with Spain (which would be like a '90s kid not knowing when 'Nam happened) or when was the Civil War.
Anyway, to the thread: one thing I caught was a critique of the methodology based on the obscurity and difficulty of the passage, to which I call BS. People were allowed to use any reference they wanted, including their phones, which even back in 2015 could connect with Wikipedia so that they could figure out what exactly Michaelmas is, if they really can't guess. I mean, they say right up front that the presumption is that people will have the kind of reading skills that would correspond to having a score of 33-36 on the Reading section of the ACT. Maybe my POV is distorted because my ACT score back in the day was already there, but the fact remains, competence to score like that is supposed to be what the BA in English is supposed to produce, and it is fair to ask of 3rd and 4th year undergrads whether they are making progress in that direction. And I say the passage is a fair test of how well I can understand and explain obscure archaic English-language utterances.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:33 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
And even in the best circumstances - the frustration and the excitement exist alongside one another.
That's fair. I think partly I was reacting to the thread as a whole. For a while there the general feeling seemed to be something like "Old books!? Well of course the kids don't like them."
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 12:33 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
That's fair. I think partly I was reacting to the thread as a whole. For a while there the general feeling seemed to be something like "Old books!? Well of course the kids don't like them."
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 12:33 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Claiming that somebody "can't read" because they have difficulty with a 175-year-old piece of literature is like claiming that they "can't drive" because they don't know how to hitch a horse to a buggy and convince it to pull them somewhere. This stuff is archaic and specialized, just because it's technically a similar skill doesn't mean it's the same task.
I don't think that's necessarily the argument being made. It's more like, they are being presented with a horse and a buggy and are asked "how would you use these two items to go across town" and they say something like, ".....well....I can feed the horse apples....and wait for it to....shit? And then I would catch the shit in this....cart thing? And then make bio fuel out of it? Because it's called a 'buggy' and that means bugs and maybe it's a rolling compost heap?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:35 PM on May 13 [13 favorites]
I don't think that's necessarily the argument being made. It's more like, they are being presented with a horse and a buggy and are asked "how would you use these two items to go across town" and they say something like, ".....well....I can feed the horse apples....and wait for it to....shit? And then I would catch the shit in this....cart thing? And then make bio fuel out of it? Because it's called a 'buggy' and that means bugs and maybe it's a rolling compost heap?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:35 PM on May 13 [13 favorites]
That's why reading science fiction is so great. You learn to tolerate confusion while staying alert to clues that clarify everything retroactively.
This is a great comment because indeed I’m sure that’s a skill I honed reading SF/fantasy. Though of course in those genres they know you don’t know so there’s a spectrum in how much they make you figure it out. Not all writers are Gene Wolfe. Whereas Dickens genuinely assumes familiarity with 19th century England.
posted by atoxyl at 12:39 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
This is a great comment because indeed I’m sure that’s a skill I honed reading SF/fantasy. Though of course in those genres they know you don’t know so there’s a spectrum in how much they make you figure it out. Not all writers are Gene Wolfe. Whereas Dickens genuinely assumes familiarity with 19th century England.
posted by atoxyl at 12:39 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
And when we get to the data section, after all is broken down and coded and analyzed, we see that only 5% of the study population is "proficient" by the standards that were picked at the beginning.
Which is to say, only 5% of them were able to read and interpret as if they could score in the 95th %-ile on the ACT Reading assessment.
I wonder if it comes as a surprise to anyone involved, that if you admit a population who have an average ACT Reading assessment score in the low 20s, you need some real heavy lifting if you expect them to ever achieve the skills of someone who tested in the 30s to start with.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:42 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Which is to say, only 5% of them were able to read and interpret as if they could score in the 95th %-ile on the ACT Reading assessment.
I wonder if it comes as a surprise to anyone involved, that if you admit a population who have an average ACT Reading assessment score in the low 20s, you need some real heavy lifting if you expect them to ever achieve the skills of someone who tested in the 30s to start with.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:42 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Next week, Moby-Dick!
posted by freakazoid at 12:54 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by freakazoid at 12:54 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
I wonder if it comes as a surprise to anyone involved, that if you admit a population who have an average ACT Reading assessment score in the low 20s, you need some real heavy lifting if you expect them to ever achieve the skills of someone who tested in the 30s to start with.
I don't think anyone is disputing that. I think we're saying that the two entire years of college-level literature instruction these folks had, by the time they took the test, should probably have done a lot of that lifting??? Or alternately, maybe should have prompted these kids to explore other majors.
I feel that perhaps the automatic defensiveness of folks in here, the shame people feel in even having to consider whether they are good readers, is making them forget that if you can't read well, it's not your fault!
This paper isn't saying wow, look at these big fuckin morons, what a bunch of ding-dongs kids are now. It's saying holy shit, we are clearly doing kids dirty in however we are teaching them to read, because these kids are the readiest readers we have and ... they can't make heads or tails of a not ridiculously difficult piece of text.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:55 PM on May 13 [16 favorites]
I don't think anyone is disputing that. I think we're saying that the two entire years of college-level literature instruction these folks had, by the time they took the test, should probably have done a lot of that lifting??? Or alternately, maybe should have prompted these kids to explore other majors.
I feel that perhaps the automatic defensiveness of folks in here, the shame people feel in even having to consider whether they are good readers, is making them forget that if you can't read well, it's not your fault!
This paper isn't saying wow, look at these big fuckin morons, what a bunch of ding-dongs kids are now. It's saying holy shit, we are clearly doing kids dirty in however we are teaching them to read, because these kids are the readiest readers we have and ... they can't make heads or tails of a not ridiculously difficult piece of text.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:55 PM on May 13 [16 favorites]
the past is both extremely normal and extremely weird, in ways that open up more understanding of history and humanity.
Seems to me that most of the weirdness has always been concentrated in the ruling classes and remains so today, and that the main reason it shows up so much more visibly in the historical record is that by and large the working poor have been leaving so much less writing behind, at least of the kind likely to end up preserved in the libraries of the rich.
Lots of history starts looking a lot less weird on the assumption that periods of civil war and invasion aside, the overwhelming majority has pretty much always been about as politically disengaged as it is today, and that most of what most ordinary people have always wanted above all else is peace and a bit of security.
posted by flabdablet at 12:57 PM on May 13
Seems to me that most of the weirdness has always been concentrated in the ruling classes and remains so today, and that the main reason it shows up so much more visibly in the historical record is that by and large the working poor have been leaving so much less writing behind, at least of the kind likely to end up preserved in the libraries of the rich.
Lots of history starts looking a lot less weird on the assumption that periods of civil war and invasion aside, the overwhelming majority has pretty much always been about as politically disengaged as it is today, and that most of what most ordinary people have always wanted above all else is peace and a bit of security.
posted by flabdablet at 12:57 PM on May 13
This is sadly nothing new. I remember a particular semester of college back in the 80s; my roommate and I both had a credit or two that wasn't being used up by required classes - which was rare, as we were both biology majors - so we decided to take a "Directed Script Reading" class for the hell of it. It was taught by the head of the drama department (who was a real character himself, but I'll save that for another conversation), the class was a lot of fun and we read through quite a few scripts. But we were both shocked at how many of the students, maybe 30-40%, had real difficulty with reading - not even "acting" a part or bringing the text to life, just simply trying to read the text. They stumbled and struggled over the words, it was clearly beyond possible shyness/stage fright at having to read aloud in front of others. How do people get into college with such a huge lack of comprehension skill??
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:59 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:59 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
How do people get into college with such a huge lack of comprehension skill??
Normalization of deviance
posted by flabdablet at 1:00 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Normalization of deviance
posted by flabdablet at 1:00 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Writing has evolved to where description is considered bad writing. If people want setting they will watch a video because you can see in a glance what it would take a writer five paragraphs to describe. But back in the day before videos, description was absolutely necessary to give the reader a setting. If you want to sell your writing now you have to leave the description out, unless you are aiming for the genre literary fiction. People don't want descriptive writing. It makes them impatient and feels like a digression. It doesn't work now in our culture. It's increasingly inaccessible.
When I spontaneously learned to read in the 3rd grade, at least a year after my school had abandoned even the pretense of teaching me how, written words literally took over part of my mind which had previously been devoted to imagery, yet so tenuous was the hegemony words exercised over their newly occupied territory, that for a year, if I was reading an illustrated book, I had to cover the illustrations with my right hand as I read, or I couldn't read the words at all.
Written language has won every battle practically since Gutenberg, but images and videos are now so reproducible and easily transmitted that they are regaining lost ground — and they have only begun to fight.
posted by jamjam at 1:05 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
When I spontaneously learned to read in the 3rd grade, at least a year after my school had abandoned even the pretense of teaching me how, written words literally took over part of my mind which had previously been devoted to imagery, yet so tenuous was the hegemony words exercised over their newly occupied territory, that for a year, if I was reading an illustrated book, I had to cover the illustrations with my right hand as I read, or I couldn't read the words at all.
Written language has won every battle practically since Gutenberg, but images and videos are now so reproducible and easily transmitted that they are regaining lost ground — and they have only begun to fight.
posted by jamjam at 1:05 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
I recommend skipping anything the least bit elite or literary (Alexander Pope? who cares!) and go straight to Daniel Defoe.
I'd suggest that Samuel Pepys is a remarkably contemporary author and very readable -- he's intentionally funny and also occasionally a buffoon. You have to work around or through his penchant for sexual harassment, but a Pepys reader could be a good experience for almost any class, especially if you discuss his reasons for stopping the diary.
Taking things back further, and perhaps unfairly since most classes will need to read them in translation, but many of the Icelandic sagas have an approach to psychology and motivation that is pretty easy for modern readers to parse, unlike a lot of the literature from the rest if Europe at the same time.
The 18th and 19th Cs had a fondness for somewhat labyrinthine prose, which, while it is a pleasure to read if that is your jam, can be extremely daunting to modern readers trained on the more journalistic prose style that has reigned since the 1920s. Keep in mind that Dickens was a very popular author, and other blockbuster writers of the 19th C wrote long and ornamented sentences. That shouldn't be taken to mean that today's readers are particularly lacking; merely that they have beenraised on a different literary diet.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:05 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I'd suggest that Samuel Pepys is a remarkably contemporary author and very readable -- he's intentionally funny and also occasionally a buffoon. You have to work around or through his penchant for sexual harassment, but a Pepys reader could be a good experience for almost any class, especially if you discuss his reasons for stopping the diary.
Taking things back further, and perhaps unfairly since most classes will need to read them in translation, but many of the Icelandic sagas have an approach to psychology and motivation that is pretty easy for modern readers to parse, unlike a lot of the literature from the rest if Europe at the same time.
The 18th and 19th Cs had a fondness for somewhat labyrinthine prose, which, while it is a pleasure to read if that is your jam, can be extremely daunting to modern readers trained on the more journalistic prose style that has reigned since the 1920s. Keep in mind that Dickens was a very popular author, and other blockbuster writers of the 19th C wrote long and ornamented sentences. That shouldn't be taken to mean that today's readers are particularly lacking; merely that they have beenraised on a different literary diet.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:05 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
(Alexander Pope? who cares!)
I've been thinking a lot about Pope throughout this thread, because I think if I knew nothing about this study, but had to pick where authors started getting "too hard" for English majors, I would've landed on Pope. I would have thought, well, without a lot of hand-holding, no one is going to be able to sit through thousands of lines of the world's most monotonous meter to pick up on the few lines everyone already knows. He's doable but it's work, in a way that Defoe and Swift are not. (At least, for me; surely other people will have had an easier time with him.)
But I may be a bad judge. My shameful confession as an English major, is that I didn't read an entire book of Dickens until long after college (Austen either), and when I finally got around to him I was a little scandalized by how good the books were; I'd been sold this line that the books are so long, and so complicated, and the language so antiquated. Would I have felt differently about Bleak House back in class? Would I have struggled with it the way I struggled with Shakespeare? (I still can't bear Shakespeare, I try so hard and nothing seems to work; watching the plays, people seem to be saying the words all wrong, in ways that sound different from how the lines sound in my head. Every few years I try again; maybe by the time I'm 70 things will start making sense.)
What's strange to me as I write this is that there was one old book I knew how to read quite thoroughly in my youth, the KJV. I spent years going to a Baptist school, and you really had to know what those passages meant. You were read them, you read them aloud, you memorized them, you explained them and had them explained, and it was all very serious (your afterlife depended on it after all), but it at least gave me the idea that it's possible to read a book that is not in your own era's language, with your own era's referents. I don't want to say that everyone in my Bible class went forth to become great literary critics, but it did provide a couple of skills that were useful down the road, I think?
A friend was talking about a recent book--I won't mention a title or author here--and when I glanced through it I was shocked by the writing. It read like...tweets, maybe? Short, staccato bursts, paragraphs of one or two sentences, often followed by a single fragment.
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
...and it really hurt my head after a page or two! It read like marketing text, I couldn't imagine how anyone could make it through an entire book like that, but then, the book is apparently a bestseller, so clearly people are making it through the entire book. Does the pendulum ever swing back? Do people begin to miss lengthy, meaty descriptions of the physical world? Of the internal thoughts--the deep, twisting emotions, rather than the 144-character italicized blurts--of characters who feel human? Or have we lost that? (And if we've lost that, what are English majors going to do when they reach the staccato era of literature? Where can they go from there?)
posted by mittens at 1:17 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
I've been thinking a lot about Pope throughout this thread, because I think if I knew nothing about this study, but had to pick where authors started getting "too hard" for English majors, I would've landed on Pope. I would have thought, well, without a lot of hand-holding, no one is going to be able to sit through thousands of lines of the world's most monotonous meter to pick up on the few lines everyone already knows. He's doable but it's work, in a way that Defoe and Swift are not. (At least, for me; surely other people will have had an easier time with him.)
But I may be a bad judge. My shameful confession as an English major, is that I didn't read an entire book of Dickens until long after college (Austen either), and when I finally got around to him I was a little scandalized by how good the books were; I'd been sold this line that the books are so long, and so complicated, and the language so antiquated. Would I have felt differently about Bleak House back in class? Would I have struggled with it the way I struggled with Shakespeare? (I still can't bear Shakespeare, I try so hard and nothing seems to work; watching the plays, people seem to be saying the words all wrong, in ways that sound different from how the lines sound in my head. Every few years I try again; maybe by the time I'm 70 things will start making sense.)
What's strange to me as I write this is that there was one old book I knew how to read quite thoroughly in my youth, the KJV. I spent years going to a Baptist school, and you really had to know what those passages meant. You were read them, you read them aloud, you memorized them, you explained them and had them explained, and it was all very serious (your afterlife depended on it after all), but it at least gave me the idea that it's possible to read a book that is not in your own era's language, with your own era's referents. I don't want to say that everyone in my Bible class went forth to become great literary critics, but it did provide a couple of skills that were useful down the road, I think?
A friend was talking about a recent book--I won't mention a title or author here--and when I glanced through it I was shocked by the writing. It read like...tweets, maybe? Short, staccato bursts, paragraphs of one or two sentences, often followed by a single fragment.
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
...and it really hurt my head after a page or two! It read like marketing text, I couldn't imagine how anyone could make it through an entire book like that, but then, the book is apparently a bestseller, so clearly people are making it through the entire book. Does the pendulum ever swing back? Do people begin to miss lengthy, meaty descriptions of the physical world? Of the internal thoughts--the deep, twisting emotions, rather than the 144-character italicized blurts--of characters who feel human? Or have we lost that? (And if we've lost that, what are English majors going to do when they reach the staccato era of literature? Where can they go from there?)
posted by mittens at 1:17 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
This was a very difficult text to start them on in terms of alien cultural knowledge - it's about a place sufficiently far enough away in both time and space that no one alive would have seen it (not without a police box, at least). I think I would have done this research with a text which might be challenging but was at least contemporary and more culturally familiar.
A lot of people in this thread are saying something akin to this, but it's why Bleak House was used. Testing English majors' ability to parse complex and exotic prose doesn't really work if the sample used is something they're familiar with. From the study:
Literary prose can be even more difficult to comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked well as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting. In addition, Bleak House is a standard in college literature classes and, so, is important for English Education students, who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in high schools.
All the reasons people are saying Bleak House was an unfair choice for the study are the reasons it was chosen!
Literally, the only part of the VIVID DESCRIPTION that stood out for me in that first Bleak House paragraph was this:
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill
because "you're suddenly throwing a random dinosaur into this scene where it makes no sense to bring in a dinosaur" DID interrupt my bored glazing-over of description to at least make me go "Huh?!"
It makes perfect sense to throw in a dinosaur if you're trying to evoke the primeval and unusually fetid nature of this particular miry day in what should be a shining Victorian metropolis. It's certainly not a random choice-even if you're not aware of dinosaurs being trendy at the time, the particular image of a dinosaur comfortably trekking around London should conjure up, at the very least, the unsuitability of humans trying to cope in the same murky environment. You could take it a bit further and imagine that Dickens is suggesting a situation in which (nearly) extinct forms of life are making themselves comfortable in a modern city, dragging themselves contentedly through the same muck that causes everyone else extreme discomfort, takes away their valuable time, and renders them coated in filth. Oh hey, that's a shout out to one of the major themes of Bleak House.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:18 PM on May 13 [9 favorites]
A lot of people in this thread are saying something akin to this, but it's why Bleak House was used. Testing English majors' ability to parse complex and exotic prose doesn't really work if the sample used is something they're familiar with. From the study:
Literary prose can be even more difficult to comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked well as an example of literary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House, Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting. In addition, Bleak House is a standard in college literature classes and, so, is important for English Education students, who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in high schools.
All the reasons people are saying Bleak House was an unfair choice for the study are the reasons it was chosen!
Literally, the only part of the VIVID DESCRIPTION that stood out for me in that first Bleak House paragraph was this:
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill
because "you're suddenly throwing a random dinosaur into this scene where it makes no sense to bring in a dinosaur" DID interrupt my bored glazing-over of description to at least make me go "Huh?!"
It makes perfect sense to throw in a dinosaur if you're trying to evoke the primeval and unusually fetid nature of this particular miry day in what should be a shining Victorian metropolis. It's certainly not a random choice-even if you're not aware of dinosaurs being trendy at the time, the particular image of a dinosaur comfortably trekking around London should conjure up, at the very least, the unsuitability of humans trying to cope in the same murky environment. You could take it a bit further and imagine that Dickens is suggesting a situation in which (nearly) extinct forms of life are making themselves comfortable in a modern city, dragging themselves contentedly through the same muck that causes everyone else extreme discomfort, takes away their valuable time, and renders them coated in filth. Oh hey, that's a shout out to one of the major themes of Bleak House.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:18 PM on May 13 [9 favorites]
I feel that perhaps the automatic defensiveness of folks in here, the shame people feel in even having to consider whether they are good readers, is making them forget that if you can't read well, it's not your fault!
This paper isn't saying wow, look at these big fuckin morons, what a bunch of ding-dongs kids are now. It's saying holy shit, we are clearly doing kids dirty in however we are teaching them to read, because these kids are the readiest readers we have and ... they can't make heads or tails of a not ridiculously difficult piece of text.
I don't think it's defensiveness to say that paper doesn't show what it thinks it shows.
I am often dismayed by people's poor reading skills, I read the tumblr post nodding along, I read the study expecting the reaction in the tumblr post to be confirmed... and I don't find it warrants those conclusions.
We can disagree on this, but why project motivations like defensiveness?
posted by trig at 1:19 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
This paper isn't saying wow, look at these big fuckin morons, what a bunch of ding-dongs kids are now. It's saying holy shit, we are clearly doing kids dirty in however we are teaching them to read, because these kids are the readiest readers we have and ... they can't make heads or tails of a not ridiculously difficult piece of text.
I don't think it's defensiveness to say that paper doesn't show what it thinks it shows.
I am often dismayed by people's poor reading skills, I read the tumblr post nodding along, I read the study expecting the reaction in the tumblr post to be confirmed... and I don't find it warrants those conclusions.
We can disagree on this, but why project motivations like defensiveness?
posted by trig at 1:19 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
flabdablet: "Seems to me that most of the weirdness has always been concentrated in the ruling classes and remains so today, and that the main reason it shows up so much more visibly in the historical record is that by and large the working poor have been leaving so much less writing behind, at least of the kind likely to end up preserved in the libraries of the rich.
Lots of history starts looking a lot less weird on the assumption that periods of civil war and invasion aside, the overwhelming majority has pretty much always been about as politically disengaged as it is today, and that most of what most ordinary people have always wanted above all else is peace and a bit of security."
I can't speak for Frowner, but that's not the kind of "the past is very weird" i'm talking about at all, though? Here's a totally trivial example, which is notable only because no matter how many times i see it (which is a lot! because i'm reading a lot of interwar books!), at least two out of every three times it ends up giving me goosebumps: characters talking about "the War" and things related to it. Because at that point there was only one! So then there's this whole intense, sort of floaty feeling of juxtaposition, like, holy shit, these characters are having interior lives that generally seem comprehensible to me even if the assumptions they make about themselves are very different, but they don't know that WWII is coming. And speaking as someone whose favorite literature is mostly SFF, there's ultimately something very SFnal about the whole vibe, frankly? The past isn't just another country, it's another whole planet! But still full of humans.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:24 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
Lots of history starts looking a lot less weird on the assumption that periods of civil war and invasion aside, the overwhelming majority has pretty much always been about as politically disengaged as it is today, and that most of what most ordinary people have always wanted above all else is peace and a bit of security."
I can't speak for Frowner, but that's not the kind of "the past is very weird" i'm talking about at all, though? Here's a totally trivial example, which is notable only because no matter how many times i see it (which is a lot! because i'm reading a lot of interwar books!), at least two out of every three times it ends up giving me goosebumps: characters talking about "the War" and things related to it. Because at that point there was only one! So then there's this whole intense, sort of floaty feeling of juxtaposition, like, holy shit, these characters are having interior lives that generally seem comprehensible to me even if the assumptions they make about themselves are very different, but they don't know that WWII is coming. And speaking as someone whose favorite literature is mostly SFF, there's ultimately something very SFnal about the whole vibe, frankly? The past isn't just another country, it's another whole planet! But still full of humans.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:24 PM on May 13 [8 favorites]
By the way, it's possible that if I saw the full transcripts I might have a different take. But just going by what's in the paper? Not so much.
posted by trig at 1:26 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by trig at 1:26 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill
Incidentally “it would not be wonderful” stood out to me as liable to confuse a modern reader. Slightly unusual construction these days combined with… not the sense of the word that people use anymore.
posted by atoxyl at 1:31 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Incidentally “it would not be wonderful” stood out to me as liable to confuse a modern reader. Slightly unusual construction these days combined with… not the sense of the word that people use anymore.
posted by atoxyl at 1:31 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Just wanted to share this fierce, epic sentence from the paragraphs in question:
This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
posted by doctornemo at 1:36 PM on May 13 [7 favorites]
This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
posted by doctornemo at 1:36 PM on May 13 [7 favorites]
> I don't think it's defensiveness to say that paper doesn't show what it thinks it shows.
I don't know what you think "it thinks it shows," but to my understanding, what it shows is college English teachers saying "we are not meeting our objectives." I mean, maybe your idea of being a "proficient reader" is not "able to be dropped cold into the deep end of an almost 200-year-old narrative set in a foreign place, and still make some sense of it." But that is definitely what the objective of a college English major is supposed be, according to these people who teach college English. That's their idea of "proficient reader," stated up-front.h
As nobody that I saw pointed out, people who were "proficient readers" by this standard before they graduated HS very plausibly have a lot of other capital to bring to the problem, including maybe historical knowledge that might offer some toeholds in a passage like the one given. I admit I, reading it for the first time and not looking things up, guessed that the setting was academic and not legal, but by the time I got to the end of the sample text everything fell into place. I did have to look up exactly what a "chancery" court does (it's supposed to be a place run under rules that produce quick, fair outcomes) and was so able to appreciate the irony of the last paragraph. But even as a HS reader, I think, I would have picked up on Dickens' "assort with" to be an archaic "associate with," just by intuitive knowledge from exposure to archaic English.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:39 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
I don't know what you think "it thinks it shows," but to my understanding, what it shows is college English teachers saying "we are not meeting our objectives." I mean, maybe your idea of being a "proficient reader" is not "able to be dropped cold into the deep end of an almost 200-year-old narrative set in a foreign place, and still make some sense of it." But that is definitely what the objective of a college English major is supposed be, according to these people who teach college English. That's their idea of "proficient reader," stated up-front.h
As nobody that I saw pointed out, people who were "proficient readers" by this standard before they graduated HS very plausibly have a lot of other capital to bring to the problem, including maybe historical knowledge that might offer some toeholds in a passage like the one given. I admit I, reading it for the first time and not looking things up, guessed that the setting was academic and not legal, but by the time I got to the end of the sample text everything fell into place. I did have to look up exactly what a "chancery" court does (it's supposed to be a place run under rules that produce quick, fair outcomes) and was so able to appreciate the irony of the last paragraph. But even as a HS reader, I think, I would have picked up on Dickens' "assort with" to be an archaic "associate with," just by intuitive knowledge from exposure to archaic English.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:39 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
I do also have to say, speaking as someone who is in fact a pretty good reader and reads widely but has always hated Dickens (they made us read A Tale of Two Cities in middle school and i was too young for it and then later "A Christmas Carol" just infuriated me): this thread has absolutely inspired me to dig up a copy of Bleak House.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:40 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:40 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Incidentally “it would not be wonderful” stood out to me as liable to confuse a modern reader. Slightly unusual construction these days combined with… not the sense of the word that people use anymore.
Only now do I realize that my brain originally parsed it as "would it not be wonderful" rather than what it actually says. My initial reading, of course, changes the meaning.
posted by asnider at 1:42 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Only now do I realize that my brain originally parsed it as "would it not be wonderful" rather than what it actually says. My initial reading, of course, changes the meaning.
posted by asnider at 1:42 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
In the interests of full disclosure I admit that I too despise A Christmas Carol.
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 1:44 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by Hypocrite_Lecteur at 1:44 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn HillAnd once again, the passage was chosen because it is hard to read and understand. It's a passage that requires full engagement from someone who is really good at puzzling out the meaning of texts, to make sense of it.
Incidentally “it would not be wonderful” stood out to me as liable to confuse a modern reader.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:47 PM on May 13
Nobody gives a shit about student evaluations except as a way to get rid of profs who are Causing Problems with their femininity or brownfulness.
This is absolutely not true by any stretch at my big public university. Departmental and college leadership care very much about student evaluations; the questions have been tweaked repeatedly over the years in response to student and professor input; the evaluations are read carefully; the comments are talked about in executive committee meetings where we form yearly evaluations for professors; we are all very well aware that the questions answered on a 1-->5 scale are generally biased against female and brown people and adjust them accordingly. Nobody really gives a shit about student evaluations for senior tenured faculty, because teaching is a very minimal part of their overall evaluation, but if the comments reveal a pattern of bias, incompetence or dismissal of student concerns, you bet your butt they'll come up in annual evals of those faculty.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:48 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
This is absolutely not true by any stretch at my big public university. Departmental and college leadership care very much about student evaluations; the questions have been tweaked repeatedly over the years in response to student and professor input; the evaluations are read carefully; the comments are talked about in executive committee meetings where we form yearly evaluations for professors; we are all very well aware that the questions answered on a 1-->5 scale are generally biased against female and brown people and adjust them accordingly. Nobody really gives a shit about student evaluations for senior tenured faculty, because teaching is a very minimal part of their overall evaluation, but if the comments reveal a pattern of bias, incompetence or dismissal of student concerns, you bet your butt they'll come up in annual evals of those faculty.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:48 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
Incidentally “it would not be wonderful” stood out to me as liable to confuse a modern reader. Slightly unusual construction these days combined with… not the sense of the word that people use anymore.
Awesome
Radical
Totally tubular
posted by phunniemee at 1:48 PM on May 13
Awesome
Radical
Totally tubular
posted by phunniemee at 1:48 PM on May 13
I agree with those who've observed that the problem is not the ability level, but that there isn't any clear improvement as students progress through college.
But that's consistent with another study that "followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college" and found "large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:50 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
But that's consistent with another study that "followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college" and found "large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:50 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
I can't speak for Frowner, but that's not the kind of "the past is very weird" i'm talking about at all, though?
Yes, the estrangement of the past isn't so much "I don't understand how these events could have happened".
Some of it is "I never heard of this event at all and it seems so different from the narrative we have, and the narrative we have explains how the past becomes the present without accounting for this thing". Naturally I can't think of a really good example even though I encounter them all the time, but one that struck me a LONG time ago was learning that many "captives" of Native people in early America didn't want to go back to white society. That's a bit of a commonplace now, but it wasn't when I was educated. The critical part here isn't so much "this event itself is weird or inexplicable", it's "this event does not align well with how we narrate the present, calling our narrative of the present into question".
Or, or, there's a LOT more specifically LGBTQ fiction that got published before about 1975 than is popularly understood, not all of it tragic. The Heart In Exile, for instance, or City of Night. The presence of queer people in American life is very different than the popular understanding of it.
Sometimes it's just weird things, like I remember reading that a wine called "Baby Duck" was this really, really huge thing in the 1970s. I've gotten used to it now, but when I first read about it, it just seemed so absolutely wild that people were going, "oh, I'm coming to dinner, I'll bring some Baby Duck". Like why not, "I'm coming to dinner, I'll bring a bottle of Adorable Kitten", etc. It just gave me a really strange feeling.
Or reading about nuclear war in popular culture in the eighties - how there's a Mr. Rogers episode and there was quite a lot of material about how to tell your children that we might all die in a nuclear conflagration. I lived in the eighties and was well aware of nuclear war, but the degree to which it was a lively subject in pop culture from the fifties onward is very strange, this normalization and cozy nuclear war. You might think "oh, I get it, Threads and The Day After", but there's so much more.
posted by Frowner at 1:52 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Yes, the estrangement of the past isn't so much "I don't understand how these events could have happened".
Some of it is "I never heard of this event at all and it seems so different from the narrative we have, and the narrative we have explains how the past becomes the present without accounting for this thing". Naturally I can't think of a really good example even though I encounter them all the time, but one that struck me a LONG time ago was learning that many "captives" of Native people in early America didn't want to go back to white society. That's a bit of a commonplace now, but it wasn't when I was educated. The critical part here isn't so much "this event itself is weird or inexplicable", it's "this event does not align well with how we narrate the present, calling our narrative of the present into question".
Or, or, there's a LOT more specifically LGBTQ fiction that got published before about 1975 than is popularly understood, not all of it tragic. The Heart In Exile, for instance, or City of Night. The presence of queer people in American life is very different than the popular understanding of it.
Sometimes it's just weird things, like I remember reading that a wine called "Baby Duck" was this really, really huge thing in the 1970s. I've gotten used to it now, but when I first read about it, it just seemed so absolutely wild that people were going, "oh, I'm coming to dinner, I'll bring some Baby Duck". Like why not, "I'm coming to dinner, I'll bring a bottle of Adorable Kitten", etc. It just gave me a really strange feeling.
Or reading about nuclear war in popular culture in the eighties - how there's a Mr. Rogers episode and there was quite a lot of material about how to tell your children that we might all die in a nuclear conflagration. I lived in the eighties and was well aware of nuclear war, but the degree to which it was a lively subject in pop culture from the fifties onward is very strange, this normalization and cozy nuclear war. You might think "oh, I get it, Threads and The Day After", but there's so much more.
posted by Frowner at 1:52 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Hypocrite_Lecteur: "In the interests of full disclosure I admit that I too despise A Christmas Carol."
Thank you! I genuinely thought i was the only one!
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:02 PM on May 13
Thank you! I genuinely thought i was the only one!
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:02 PM on May 13
adrienneleigh: " this thread has absolutely inspired me to dig up a copy of Bleak House."
By comparison, I have decided NEVER to read Bleak House. But I wasn't going to anyway :P
I will say that Christmas Carol was the one Dickens I could stand to read, at least it was short and not horrendously depressing at the end.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:06 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
By comparison, I have decided NEVER to read Bleak House. But I wasn't going to anyway :P
I will say that Christmas Carol was the one Dickens I could stand to read, at least it was short and not horrendously depressing at the end.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:06 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
As nobody that I saw pointed out, people who were "proficient readers" by this standard before they graduated HS very plausibly have a lot of other capital to bring to the problem, including maybe historical knowledge that might offer some toeholds in a passage like the one given.
And when we get to the authors talking about the 5% "proficient readers" we get
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:06 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
And when we get to the authors talking about the 5% "proficient readers" we get
Finally, the proficient readers’ knowledge of historical details, whether nineteenth-century pollution from coal, child labor, or the British custom of judges wearing wigs, allowed these readers to fill in some context and understand Dickens’ specific references to life in the 1820s.Which I take to mean, these 4 kids out of the 85, they are the ones who tested in the 95th %-ile when in HS, and they bring all kinds of cultural capital to the problem that the other 95% of English majors do not have access to, when they start college. And also, college English programs are completely failing to endow them with that capital, during the 4 years they've got to work with.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:06 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I doubt even educated mefites here are familiar with the Inns of Court or even Michaelmas.
Inns of Court: first encountered the term in a National Geographic article showing the anachronistic fashions and traditions in the place.
Michaelmas: first encountered the English custom of dating an event in reference to the Anglican calendar in the Diary of Adrian Mole, 13 3/4.
Lord Chancellor: my wife was in Iolanthe.
Without having read any Dickens cover to cover, I already knew that Bleak House was a screed denouncing the legal system for being in love with its own processes while producing outcomes that did not resemble justice.
I am an engineer with little formal education in literature. I expect better from people aspiring to get degrees or teach in this field.
posted by ocschwar at 2:13 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Inns of Court: first encountered the term in a National Geographic article showing the anachronistic fashions and traditions in the place.
Michaelmas: first encountered the English custom of dating an event in reference to the Anglican calendar in the Diary of Adrian Mole, 13 3/4.
Lord Chancellor: my wife was in Iolanthe.
Without having read any Dickens cover to cover, I already knew that Bleak House was a screed denouncing the legal system for being in love with its own processes while producing outcomes that did not resemble justice.
I am an engineer with little formal education in literature. I expect better from people aspiring to get degrees or teach in this field.
posted by ocschwar at 2:13 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Lord Chancellor: my wife was in Iolanthe.
my brother performed in a hs production of Iolanthe
is your wife my brother??
A. Reader
posted by Didymus at 2:18 PM on May 13
my brother performed in a hs production of Iolanthe
is your wife my brother??
A. Reader
posted by Didymus at 2:18 PM on May 13
To my mind, modern English Lit training should be taught via TVTropes. Nothing understands conventions of contemporary literary form better than that site, and I love it.
I know a thing or two about 19th century London, so the Dickens excerpt isn't as opaque to me as it is to other folks born in the same hospital. But I liked the reply here talking about Tom Clancy burying you in jargon and code numbers. This is the kind of bafflement I experience whenever anyone talks about cars, which I have never had an interest in and never wanted to learn to drive.
So when a book talks about a character "rolling up in a 1974 Blevvy Harbadoo" I just grimace and nod like "okay okay I hope that's not their entire personality like it seems to be for all the other characters..."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:27 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I know a thing or two about 19th century London, so the Dickens excerpt isn't as opaque to me as it is to other folks born in the same hospital. But I liked the reply here talking about Tom Clancy burying you in jargon and code numbers. This is the kind of bafflement I experience whenever anyone talks about cars, which I have never had an interest in and never wanted to learn to drive.
So when a book talks about a character "rolling up in a 1974 Blevvy Harbadoo" I just grimace and nod like "okay okay I hope that's not their entire personality like it seems to be for all the other characters..."
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:27 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
I am an engineer with little formal education in literature. I expect better from people aspiring to get degrees or teach in this field.
I bet you scored 98%-ile in reading comprehension among your age cohort before you started college too.
The article is about how English programs are failing to train graduates who can do what you can do with no training at all. I wonder how successful that project was, ever. Or if it used to be that English got a bigger fraction of the freshmen admitted with high test scores. Or neither, and the situation has always been abysmal.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:30 PM on May 13
I bet you scored 98%-ile in reading comprehension among your age cohort before you started college too.
The article is about how English programs are failing to train graduates who can do what you can do with no training at all. I wonder how successful that project was, ever. Or if it used to be that English got a bigger fraction of the freshmen admitted with high test scores. Or neither, and the situation has always been abysmal.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:30 PM on May 13
The authors of the paper failed to read the text successfully:
They state:
The most common was oversimplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic
statement. In the first paragraphs of Bleak House, Dickens follows the fog on
the river Thames as it moves from the center of London and winds down
to the Essex marshes, 51 miles away from the city. He then centers on the
shipyard in the Holborn District of London, the same district that included
Lincoln’s Inn, the home of the Court of Chancery.Again, one subject’s
response will stand for the others:
Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among
the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city.
Facilitator: O.K.
Subject: There’s just fog everywhere.
(A few minutes later in the taped session.)
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog
lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial
part of the city?
Facilitator: O.K.
By reducing all these details in the passage to vague, generic language, the
subject does not read closely enough to follow the fog as it moves throughout the shipyards. And, as she continues to skip over almost all the concrete details in the following sentences, she never recognizes that this literal
fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion,
disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery.
I've read the passage a few times over. Dickens describe the fog in various locations, and in each of those locations it is moving in some way. But as far as I can tell the fog is described as being in all of these places simultaneously, not winding it's way through the city as the authors state:
Dickens follows the fog on the river Thames as it moves from the center of London and winds down to the Essex marshes, 51 miles away from the city.
The first phrase in the actual text is: "Fog everywhere." But they seem to have left that out of the sample.
The fog is not winding from the Thames through London to the Essex marshes, it's not expanding through London. It's not going somewhere, it doesn't have a destination.
Maybe I'm missing something? I think the authors can't read.
posted by cron at 2:40 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
They state:
The most common was oversimplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic
statement. In the first paragraphs of Bleak House, Dickens follows the fog on
the river Thames as it moves from the center of London and winds down
to the Essex marshes, 51 miles away from the city. He then centers on the
shipyard in the Holborn District of London, the same district that included
Lincoln’s Inn, the home of the Court of Chancery.Again, one subject’s
response will stand for the others:
Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among
the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city.
Facilitator: O.K.
Subject: There’s just fog everywhere.
(A few minutes later in the taped session.)
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog
lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial
part of the city?
Facilitator: O.K.
By reducing all these details in the passage to vague, generic language, the
subject does not read closely enough to follow the fog as it moves throughout the shipyards. And, as she continues to skip over almost all the concrete details in the following sentences, she never recognizes that this literal
fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion,
disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery.
I've read the passage a few times over. Dickens describe the fog in various locations, and in each of those locations it is moving in some way. But as far as I can tell the fog is described as being in all of these places simultaneously, not winding it's way through the city as the authors state:
Dickens follows the fog on the river Thames as it moves from the center of London and winds down to the Essex marshes, 51 miles away from the city.
The first phrase in the actual text is: "Fog everywhere." But they seem to have left that out of the sample.
The fog is not winding from the Thames through London to the Essex marshes, it's not expanding through London. It's not going somewhere, it doesn't have a destination.
Maybe I'm missing something? I think the authors can't read.
posted by cron at 2:40 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
And OK I finally read the tumblr thing as well as TFA, and I was able to get over the ee cummings reaction without too much trouble and don't see why anybody is hating on that person.
Maybe my experience is irrelevant because my last time in the school system as a student is so long ago, and maybe there is some new crisis of literacy that started sometime in the last 40 years or less. But the person upthread who mentioned people who can't read out loud without fumbling and halting? That was my peers too. Going on 50 years ago now.
I can easily believe that college has never had the ability to impart the kind of literacy skills these authors are aiming for, to students who come in with slightly-higher-than-average-for-the-general-population verbal skills, and that the current situation has a lot to do with the freshman classes getting high-graded by STEM and finance majors.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:42 PM on May 13
Maybe my experience is irrelevant because my last time in the school system as a student is so long ago, and maybe there is some new crisis of literacy that started sometime in the last 40 years or less. But the person upthread who mentioned people who can't read out loud without fumbling and halting? That was my peers too. Going on 50 years ago now.
I can easily believe that college has never had the ability to impart the kind of literacy skills these authors are aiming for, to students who come in with slightly-higher-than-average-for-the-general-population verbal skills, and that the current situation has a lot to do with the freshman classes getting high-graded by STEM and finance majors.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:42 PM on May 13
The fog is not winding from the Thames through London to the Essex marshes, it's not expanding through London. It's not going somewhere, it doesn't have a destination.
the fog might not be moving but the narrator is moving through the fog
posted by dis_integration at 2:43 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
the fog might not be moving but the narrator is moving through the fog
posted by dis_integration at 2:43 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
the fog might not be moving but the narrator is moving through the fog
Sure, but that's not what the authors say. They simply misread the text.
And, actually, your point is a lot more interesting. But it's more sophisticated than the basic reading errors that the authors are worried about and which they themselves are also committing.
posted by cron at 2:46 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Sure, but that's not what the authors say. They simply misread the text.
And, actually, your point is a lot more interesting. But it's more sophisticated than the basic reading errors that the authors are worried about and which they themselves are also committing.
posted by cron at 2:46 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
oh no the readers can't read and the writers can't write
posted by phunniemee at 2:50 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
posted by phunniemee at 2:50 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
To my mind, modern English Lit training should be taught via TVTropes. Nothing understands conventions of contemporary literary form better than that site, and I love it.
Challenge accepted. I'll do it in my fall class, and report back.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:00 PM on May 13 [7 favorites]
Challenge accepted. I'll do it in my fall class, and report back.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:00 PM on May 13 [7 favorites]
the fog "flows" upriver and "rolls" downriver - that is, it moves
posted by pyramid termite at 3:01 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by pyramid termite at 3:01 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
phunniemee: "oh no the readers can't read and the writers can't write"
Great, then we're back to another AI thread.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:05 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Great, then we're back to another AI thread.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:05 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
the fog "flows" upriver and "rolls" downriver - that is, it moves
Yes but what about the cat feet.
WHAT 🐾 ABOUT🐾THE🐾LITTLE🐾CAT🐾FEET, CHARLES
posted by phunniemee at 3:11 PM on May 13 [12 favorites]
Yes but what about the cat feet.
WHAT 🐾 ABOUT🐾THE🐾LITTLE🐾CAT🐾FEET, CHARLES
posted by phunniemee at 3:11 PM on May 13 [12 favorites]
This is giving me flashbacks to high school advanced lit and reading Tess of the D’urbervilles and my friend complaining he didn’t “get it” and me saying whats there to get, just skim it and get the idea. Fields, guilt, obvious baby name, more fields, Hardy has clearly fallen in love with his subject, aaaaand now we’re at Stonehenge.
Which one of us was right??? Who knows. Between to the two of us I at least turned my paper in on time.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:14 PM on May 13
Which one of us was right??? Who knows. Between to the two of us I at least turned my paper in on time.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:14 PM on May 13
the fog "flows" upriver and "rolls" downriver - that is, it moves
Yes! The fog is in motion in each place that it is described. But it is not written as progressing through London or moving towards an overall destination. I think the text is quite clear about that. As dis_integration pointed out, it is the narrative framing that is progressing. The frame is moving towards the Chancery court and on another level the literal fog is moving towards becoming the metaphorical fog of the court.
I wouldn't be so pedantic if the point of the original paper was not about kids failing to understand even the most basic facts of the texts. But maybe I'm wrong.
posted by cron at 3:18 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
Yes! The fog is in motion in each place that it is described. But it is not written as progressing through London or moving towards an overall destination. I think the text is quite clear about that. As dis_integration pointed out, it is the narrative framing that is progressing. The frame is moving towards the Chancery court and on another level the literal fog is moving towards becoming the metaphorical fog of the court.
I wouldn't be so pedantic if the point of the original paper was not about kids failing to understand even the most basic facts of the texts. But maybe I'm wrong.
posted by cron at 3:18 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
the fog "flows" upriver and "rolls" downriver - that is, it moves
it's moving, but it's everywhere already. So, a continuous, moving river of fog, not fog creeping up on you out of a clear sky.
The authors also say something odd here:
He then finds a good way to explain
Dickens’ clause, “where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have
been slipping and sliding since the day broke,” by stating that the people
in this sentence are just the “latest generation” to be walking in the mud
that day.
That makes no sense. It's the tens of thousands who have been moving about London since dawn, and then in a parenthetical pointing out that it's too gloomy to really say that there was a dawn. You don't need to read in "generations of Londoners" at all. It's weird that the authors thought that this was a good reading.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:20 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
it's moving, but it's everywhere already. So, a continuous, moving river of fog, not fog creeping up on you out of a clear sky.
The authors also say something odd here:
He then finds a good way to explain
Dickens’ clause, “where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have
been slipping and sliding since the day broke,” by stating that the people
in this sentence are just the “latest generation” to be walking in the mud
that day.
That makes no sense. It's the tens of thousands who have been moving about London since dawn, and then in a parenthetical pointing out that it's too gloomy to really say that there was a dawn. You don't need to read in "generations of Londoners" at all. It's weird that the authors thought that this was a good reading.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:20 PM on May 13 [5 favorites]
Perhaps it’s Dickens who failed to write appropriately for an audience of early twenty-first century college students.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:22 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by mbrubeck at 3:22 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Now we've gotten to the pettifogging. That's just great Bleak.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:24 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:24 PM on May 13 [4 favorites]
More broadly and per my most recent Ask, it's shit like this that got me to embark on my read books that got turned into movies project. Years of elite education had sucked all joy from reading and so I was retreating into the same 30 or so books again and again when I wanted to read for escapist fun. Much easier to read something new when you already know the plot. Delightful to read No Country for Old Men when you know what Tommy Lee Jones sounds like. Way more fun to know Enzo was a butcher first and Coppola-Puzo is better than just Puzo alone. Broke me out of my reading rut. Media literacy begets media literacy, and English teachers beget English teachers who make kids dread reading.
posted by phunniemee at 3:24 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by phunniemee at 3:24 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
adrienneleigh: " this thread has absolutely inspired me to dig up a copy of Bleak House."
By comparison, I have decided NEVER to read Bleak House. But I wasn't going to anyway :P
Just to round things out, I have decided to keep Bleak House on my list of books I keep thinking I might like to read some day but never seem to actually get around to.
posted by nickmark at 3:34 PM on May 13 [11 favorites]
By comparison, I have decided NEVER to read Bleak House. But I wasn't going to anyway :P
Just to round things out, I have decided to keep Bleak House on my list of books I keep thinking I might like to read some day but never seem to actually get around to.
posted by nickmark at 3:34 PM on May 13 [11 favorites]
With a Megalodon!
You're confusing your Dickens and your Statham. Easy mistake to make.
posted by biffa at 3:35 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
You're confusing your Dickens and your Statham. Easy mistake to make.
posted by biffa at 3:35 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Now we've gotten to the pettifogging
In more ways than one!
posted by trig at 3:41 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
In more ways than one!
pettifogger(n.)(Though there's also the less-fun and -fitting derivation from "pettifactor 'legal agent who undertakes small cases' (1580s)".)
"inferior or petty attorney employed in small or mean business," or, as Henley has it, "An attorney of the baser sort: a sharking lawyer," 1560s, often treated as two words or hyphenated. The first is petty; the second element is probably provincial fogger "a huckster; a cheat, one who engages in mean or disreputable practices," which is perhaps from obsolete Dutch focker, from Flemish focken "to cheat," or from Middle English fugger; both words seem to be from Fugger the name of the renowned family of merchants and financiers of 15c.-16c. Augsburg. In German, Flemish and Dutch, the surname became a word for "monopolist, rich man, usurer."
posted by trig at 3:41 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
A friend was talking about a recent book--I won't mention a title or author here--and when I glanced through it I was shocked by the writing. It read like...tweets, maybe? Short, staccato bursts, paragraphs of one or two sentences, often followed by a single fragment.
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
Supposedly readers in the vicinity of BookTok are hardcore skimmers to the point of skipping any descriptive paragraphs in favor of dialog, so I suppose writers are adapting. If everyone skips paragraphs of any length I guess you have to break them all up if you want people to read anything outside of quotation marks.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:46 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
Supposedly readers in the vicinity of BookTok are hardcore skimmers to the point of skipping any descriptive paragraphs in favor of dialog, so I suppose writers are adapting. If everyone skips paragraphs of any length I guess you have to break them all up if you want people to read anything outside of quotation marks.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:46 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
(ditto Netflix, who allegedly has instructed their writers to put more descriptions in dialog for people who aren't actually watching the screen)
posted by BungaDunga at 3:49 PM on May 13
posted by BungaDunga at 3:49 PM on May 13
The more I look at this study, the more I think the interviewers just failed to make clear to the subjects what they were looking for, which is why very few scored as proficient on their subjective scale. For example:
posted by ssg at 3:51 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fogI can totally buy that the subject didn't know what a collier brig was or what gunwales are, but I can't believe that they don't know what ships and boats are. I think they simply did not understand that the researchers were looking for a literal restatement of the content of each sentence.
lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial
part of the city?
posted by ssg at 3:51 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
It read like...tweets, maybe? Short, staccato bursts, paragraphs of one or two sentences, often followed by a single fragment.
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
oh nooooooo
Great American Novelist Cormac McCarthy 1 full year before Twitter existed.
posted by phunniemee at 4:02 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
For emphasis.
So many. Just for emphasis.
oh nooooooo
Great American Novelist Cormac McCarthy 1 full year before Twitter existed.
posted by phunniemee at 4:02 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Bleak House was published in 1853. The use of the word 'pettifogging' seems to have peaked around 1847 at @.20 per million.
posted by jamjam at 4:03 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
posted by jamjam at 4:03 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
What exactly are the authors expecting of college students who only scored a 22 on their ACT? Mediocre test scores would suggest mediocre results.
posted by Veritron at 4:12 PM on May 13
posted by Veritron at 4:12 PM on May 13
Sure they were allowed to use their phones but I'd also be hesitant to look things up when an English grad student is watching me and writing things down like
[ Transcript: 32 seconds of trembling and whimpering]
posted by Pyry at 4:30 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
[ Transcript: 32 seconds of trembling and whimpering]
posted by Pyry at 4:30 PM on May 13 [3 favorites]
WHAT 🐾 ABOUT🐾THE🐾LITTLE🐾CAT🐾FEET, CHARLES
as richard brautigan pointed out, the fog moves on little fog feet
posted by pyramid termite at 4:38 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
as richard brautigan pointed out, the fog moves on little fog feet
posted by pyramid termite at 4:38 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
One of my computer science professors spent some time writing a novel, he said it was one of the most cognitively challenging things to do, like programming in that you have to hold so much going on in your head at once.
This study frames it as a problem of prose literacy, but humanities education from K-12 is never really about that--we're barely explicitly taught how to read effectively--English teachers are much more preoccupied with testing students their grasp of (the teacher's interpretation of) themes, character, literary devices, etc. Perversely, it seems studying or doing research in STEM forces you to understand prose in an analytic fashion, and if you're wrong, you'll soon get wrong results in your face. This analytic reading is what those writing samples in the study are looking for, just that it's from Dickens and not some scientific paper.
posted by polymodus at 4:39 PM on May 13
This study frames it as a problem of prose literacy, but humanities education from K-12 is never really about that--we're barely explicitly taught how to read effectively--English teachers are much more preoccupied with testing students their grasp of (the teacher's interpretation of) themes, character, literary devices, etc. Perversely, it seems studying or doing research in STEM forces you to understand prose in an analytic fashion, and if you're wrong, you'll soon get wrong results in your face. This analytic reading is what those writing samples in the study are looking for, just that it's from Dickens and not some scientific paper.
posted by polymodus at 4:39 PM on May 13
What exactly are the authors expecting of college students who only scored a 22 on their ACT? Mediocre test scores would suggest mediocre results.
They would have had several years of their undergrad since they took the ACT. These results suggest that, for most of them, their undergraduate education had not improved their ability to read moderately tricky texts at all. Which seems like a real sad waste of time- imagine pushing through an English degree like this. It would be miserable.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:39 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
They would have had several years of their undergrad since they took the ACT. These results suggest that, for most of them, their undergraduate education had not improved their ability to read moderately tricky texts at all. Which seems like a real sad waste of time- imagine pushing through an English degree like this. It would be miserable.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:39 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
Great American Novelist Cormac McCarthy 1 full year before Twitter existed.
hmm, mccarthy died in 2023, this mafia princess book came out in 2022...yeah, no, he could've totally written this.
posted by mittens at 4:50 PM on May 13
hmm, mccarthy died in 2023, this mafia princess book came out in 2022...yeah, no, he could've totally written this.
posted by mittens at 4:50 PM on May 13
Since my salary depends on other people not understanding the writing in front of them, the study helps me be more optimistic about the future.
posted by SnowRottie at 4:58 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
posted by SnowRottie at 4:58 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]
What exactly are the authors expecting of college students who only scored a 22 on their ACT? Mediocre test scores would suggest mediocre results.
Man, of all the hot takes I thought I might encounter here, I was not expecting reheated "a person's ability can be measured by standardized tests" left overs.
posted by Gygesringtone at 5:19 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Man, of all the hot takes I thought I might encounter here, I was not expecting reheated "a person's ability can be measured by standardized tests" left overs.
posted by Gygesringtone at 5:19 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
I did not find any capitalization necessary to follow what they were saying, and the prevalence of this reflexive pooh-poohing of the link is a really tiresome aspect of this website.
Ok, well you didn't.
It's not something I'm currently accustomed to (even though I experienced it and got somewhat used to it for a little while in grad school) and it makes my ever-increasingly-dyslexic-as-I-get-older brain hurt. We use all sorts of visual cues to make written language more easily readable and encode information. Commas, periods, semicolons, the highly contested em-dash, and yes, capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
That said, I did find the post interesting and thought-provoking -- it's not that the lack of punctuation prevented me from appreciating it, but it did make my old and tired brain work unnecessarily hard, which I found ironic given the topic being discussed
posted by treepour at 5:49 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
Ok, well you didn't.
It's not something I'm currently accustomed to (even though I experienced it and got somewhat used to it for a little while in grad school) and it makes my ever-increasingly-dyslexic-as-I-get-older brain hurt. We use all sorts of visual cues to make written language more easily readable and encode information. Commas, periods, semicolons, the highly contested em-dash, and yes, capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
That said, I did find the post interesting and thought-provoking -- it's not that the lack of punctuation prevented me from appreciating it, but it did make my old and tired brain work unnecessarily hard, which I found ironic given the topic being discussed
posted by treepour at 5:49 PM on May 13 [1 favorite]
this thread has absolutely inspired me to dig up a copy of Bleak House.
It's really quite wonderful. I'd be happy to "host" a MeFi book club on the subject.
posted by Thivaia 2.0 at 5:54 PM on May 13
It's really quite wonderful. I'd be happy to "host" a MeFi book club on the subject.
posted by Thivaia 2.0 at 5:54 PM on May 13
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in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.
the model of reading pedagogy i was taught has about 6 million little "tools" that all boil down to telling kids who functionally can't read to try harder to read.
the research was conducted january to april 2015. so there's no pandemic influence, no AI issue
"maybe some high school english teachers can't read the first seven paragraphs of bleak house?" should be kept in mind when we discuss present-day educational ills.
posted by rory at 5:24 AM on May 13 [7 favorites]