I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
> You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
I would rate the amount of specific context necessary to understand a random snippet of kernel code much higher than what you need for that Dickens passage. It's certainly much more dense with metaphor and playful use of language than normal prose, but I don't find it that opaque, even as an non-native speaker.
> The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
Well, yes, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the article. The bell curve at the bottom basically says that the comprehension they were expecting is in the top 3% or so, not the 60% of the general population who "have to get a degree". Add in all the Netflix and TikTok casualties, and the result ceases to be surprising.
> Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
This was a kind of frustrating part of the article. Not catching the reference to the flood, or the age of the dinosaurs is pretty shocking. But not knowing what Lincoln's Inn Hall is?
They seemed to expect the kids to look up every word they didn't know. Which, if they were being paid to do a professional translation that was going to be published somewhere, would be a legit expectation. Expecting people donating their time for a study... not so much.
> most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them
The inability to understand sarcasm on the internet is far worse today than it was 10 years ago, and i don't think this can be explained by the influx of larger audience, because this keeps happening in very niche communities. It's something happening globally, even in non-english countries. my guess is it has to do with the dumbing-down of popular media (the internet) to the point where words are removed and only emoji are left (which severely limits the bandwidth of conversation)
It can be hard to convey sarcasm, especially in writing, and especially when you don't know the actual stance of the person writing.
If I mention "big beautiful tariffs" in a peer group of liberals, they can assume I'm being sarcastic. If I'm posting anonymously on the internet, then who knows, maybe I genuinely reject the economic orthodoxy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
In this context, emoji might actually be helpful in expressing sarcasm. Big beautiful tariffs :roll_eyes:
> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
> And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels?
The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
The time constraint wouldn't be an issue if they were comfortable with the passage. You can give them unlimited time and they might provide a sufficient response, or just quit and move along in the study, which also stated in the reading.
And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result, but that's not atypical for me online community, whose denizens are a cut above the rest...
This was also noted in the study:
* [...] However, these same subjects (defined in the study as problematic readers) also believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.
Keep in mind that the students were English majors, so understanding complex classical works might be expected at some point.
> The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
It doesn't look for me as a satisfactory explanation. Were they stressed because they were forced to think hard, or were they stressed because they were afraid to show their incompetence to a professor? Or maybe some other reason?
If the process of thought makes students stressed, then I don't know what can be done. But if they were afraid of a professor, then this stress factor could be and should be removed. For example, I can imagine how they chose to guess instead of thinking things through because they felt that a long thinking can look bad in professor's eyes. If so then students didn't even tried to read carefully, they were guessing, and the question arise: what the study had measured in this case?
> And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result
Why do you think so? I have read the text, I really spent some time on it, because it was hard for me (I mentioned specifically that I was confused for a minute by "but newly" stuffed inside of "had retired"). Then I read samples of students interpretations of the text. I believe that this is enough by itself to believe that I was better. For example, I understood that there was no megalosaurus despite being confused by "but newly". Still I had looked into the original article and had found the interpretation of a "single proficient reader", to compare it with what I've got from the text. The most interesting finding: they completely ignored megalosaurus like I did.
The only catch is I've read just one paragraph, while students were reading more of them, but I don't think it will change the results significantly. I can become bored or overconfident and students can get hang of Dickens' language after a couple of paragraphs so they will show better performance than me, but I don't believe it.
Hypothesis: US students are disconnected from real humans, thanks to social media. Reading is one half of communication, and you need to understand people to understand their intentions through text. A reality built on TikTok feeds is incapable of interpreting the writings of someone who doesn't binge the Web.
> But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels?
Because they can’t pass up the opportunity to dunk on people, is my guess. This whole article is a sham. They’re not measuring literacy, they’re fishing for a sensational conclusion. It was an utter waste of time even reading this article, which I foolishly finished to the end.
> In fact, none of the [problematic readers] ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.
> these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text.
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> I found that a majority of [English majors] had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn’t grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing.
> Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.
I feel there's multiple factors in all of this, but the central spiral could be summarized as corrupting economic pressure on learning that forces schools to reduce rigor for the sake of increasing the passing rate.
There could be an inclusion bias however. Long ago, only a select few students would go to college. If we looked at the test results of 2024 students that also would likely have gone to college had they been in the class of 1960, would we see such a difference?
There's an interesting disconnect between readers who read for the "painting with words" aspect of novels and readers who read solely for the plot.
My first impression on quickly reading that passage is it was very muddy, very very muddy, and nothing plot important had happened yet, but we need dinosaur metaphors to say just how muddy it was.
For someone reading for the plot the text did not contain a lot of information.
How much plot could one or two paragraphs from a wider body of work contain?
We do learn more than it’s just muddy. For example the Lord Chancellor is somewhat introduced. We know the time of year. We know it’s been muddy for a while. We know the time of year. We know some term has finished so it’s likely that less people are around or it is quieter than usual. Whether these are relevant to the whole plot we can’t tell from such a short passage but that is true of any extract.
Doesn't Dickens want us to read the text slowly and imagine a dinosaur stomping around after the flood, horses and dogs dealing with the weather, and all sorts of visuals?
It's not about the amount of words but what is expected by the reader parsing them. The reader is expected to spend a lot of time imagining the non- plot stuff.
One would hope that someone choosing studying literature at university would at least be slightly interested in the literary arts.
However I suspect that 'English' might also end up being the default major for many people who don't particularly know what they want to study and aren't particularly adept or interested in any specific area.
what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication. Painting with words is essential in lit even if you do not notice. Maybe Beethoven writes chord progressions leaves it at that?
but in clarity yours is a STEM technical writing approach. Fine for stem, not fine for an English major. Muddy. Very very muddy. Relevant only to the carriage schedule and whether murderer gets gunk on his boots. True often for ersatz writers and professional emails. But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on. This is also communication by painting. The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
>what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication.
So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?
>But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on.
That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.
> The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
There's no need to be so confrontational.
Isaac Asimov is nowhere close to being my favorite writer but I offer this for your amusement. In his autobiography "I, Asimov" he talks about his simple writing style:
>Before Pebble in the Sky was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be- forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gently sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track.
>"Do you know," he said, "how Hemingway would say, 'The sun rose the next morning'?"
>"No," I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway) "How would he say it, Brad?"
>Brad said, "He would say, 'The sun rose the next morning.'
>That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust-, writing it plainly, and Brad took it.
Interest. I log in after a while and read post. Asimov is amusing to some but few would call literature. That is fine! I enjoy pop filler.
I like cute anecdote, it has certain use, against purple prose. It is a tool, not a Foundation.
The point "say simply" is in short essays DFW, George Orwell politics and the English language, Schopenhauer, however, they do not simply speak simply.
> So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?
I think your error is extreme literal mind. The plot goes in math function and we solve murder mystery by weighing objects on scales and deducing. Certain are meant to be read in such way, and others not. Literature is not.
Above quote is excellent display as it tries say "your definition of literature is idiosyncratic, you are a dictator of definitions" with big L Liberal towards taste. Who's to say smash piano with hammer not better than Chopin, former is postmodern preference there are no elites here.
> That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.
Lord Chancellor is already character because he exists as a person in story? Regardless, we can speak about characters without their names, even without speaking, that is what I mean.
I have anecdote Umberto Eco Mouse or Rat to match re literal
"In his notes to a recent Italian translation of Moby Dick the translator, Bernardo Draghi, spends three pages apropos the famous opening line, Call me Ishmael. Previous Italian translators put, quite literally, Chiamatemi Ismaele. Draghi remarks that the original opening line suggests at least three readings: (i) ‘My real name is not Ishmael, but please call me so, and try to guess what my choice means (think of the fate of Ishmael son of Abraham and Agar)’; (ii) ‘My name is not important, I am only a witness of a great tragedy’; (iii) ‘Let us be on first-name terms, take me as a friend, trust my report.’"
"Now, let us assume that Melville really wanted to suggest one or more of those readings, and that there was a reason why he did not write My name is Ishmael (which in Italian would be, literally, ‘Mi chiamo Ismaele’). Draghi’s translation reads Diciamo che mi chiamo Ismaele, which could be roughly translated as Let us say that my name is Ishmael. Even though I appreciate the rest of this translation, I cannot but object that (apart from the fact that the Italian version is less concise than the original), with his choice Draghi has inevitably stressed interpretations (i) and (ii), but has eliminated the third one. If Melville wanted to remain ambiguous – Draghi eliminates part of the ambiguity."
How would Hemingway introduce as Ishmael? Call me Ishmael.
That was a very good summary where some friends and I very much disagreed how much we enjoyed GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire where they praised the detailed descriptions and me being like "He wrote two paragraphs about how the cloak was red, that's one not overly long sentence".
From reading the examples, it just looks like the subjects weren't properly motivated. If you read a hard text and just say the first thing that comes to your mind and immediately continue to the next sentence, of course you're going to do bad. But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
> But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
Pride? Dignity? I wasn't tested but still read the text with the intent to comprehend it. The people tested made nonchalant guesses, but given they were all English students, you'd expect them to have intrinsic motivation / pride.
We must have interacted with very different students in our lives if you think students will put any effort whatsoever in a test whose results have no consequence.
Hell, at my jobs people take pride in hacking their way through security training instead of watching the 5 minute video.
I think pride would push one in the opposite direction: a prideful student wouldn't want to be seen having to look something up in front of the interviewer.
In high school I was national laureate of Physics Olympiad. Then I went to college with a mindset that I can learn anything. First week's physics lecture taught me that, no, I can't, if the teacher's attempt at teaching is so abysmal. On the final exam at the end of the semester I ended up with barely passing grade, that I had to fight for at additional verbal exam. The same semester I got top grade with informal plus for excellence in the physics exercise classes where we solved physics problems, because the person teaching those was not terrible at his job.
You pay teachers garbage pay and not evaluate them competitively so you are attracting a lot of not so great people to the profession. Then you just give them students they can't control, let alone teach and never monitor if they actually learn anything during classes. So that's what you get in the end. People who haven't been taught anything but still "passed".
Some did well, some did bad. Completely unsuspicious gauss curve you can easily achieve if you are aiming for it when you grade. Nobody's gonna argue because we signed up for computer science and physics is just there to be passed and forgotten.
Of course the problem was me. I needed to understand to remember. Many people don't need that. They can reproduce completely arbitrary piece of text they were "taught". The grade I got from him was the only non top level semester grade I got in my about nine years of learning physics across five different teachers. And it's not that he hated me or something. We barely interacted. He was just terrible at explaining things and I didn't have a book I could just read instead of trying to understand him. Terrible teacher can make all the difference.
That's an interesting question. I was thinking that my Australian English would cope a lot better with this; conversely, I sometimes struggle to cope with American English literature on the first read-through.
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
If I were studying Spanish literature I wouldn't dream of not studying Iberian Spanish literature
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
I guess the big question is where in their study are they? I'm assuming it's perfectly possible to get through high school in the US without ever studying any 19th century UK literature. I certainly got through school in England without studying any US literature at all.
If we're talking students a few weeks into their first term at University then it is not at all surprising that they've never read any literature from England. If on the other hand they're a few weeks from graduating, then it would be much more surprising.
Original Text:
"Bruh, that party was straight outta Ohio, no cap. Skibidi vibes only. Tyler’s drip was bussin’, and Jessica was ghostin’ everyone like she hit airplane mode IRL."
Dickens: "Upon my soul! The tale describes an occasion in Ohio, indeed a peculiar land, from the inference here. 'No cap,' evidently suggests none of the attendees wore hats—perhaps a custom or rule strictly enforced for reasons unknown. Fascinating! Now, these 'Skibidi vibes' I take to indicate an exotic form of music or perhaps a ceremonial dance, unique to these Ohio gatherings.
And concerning young Master Tyler—his 'drip was bussin’'—it is clear he suffered from an alarming medical condition! Possibly a wound that would not cease bleeding, creating quite the tragic spectacle. Yet, the narrator sounds oddly approving; perhaps there is some honorable valor attached to enduring such afflictions publicly.
Lastly, Miss Jessica, 'ghostin’ everyone,' seemingly invoked spiritual manifestations or perhaps vanished mysteriously, akin to an apparition. Her going into 'airplane mode IRL' must surely mean she fled swiftly, flying away in a vehicle capable of flight. Extraordinary! What incredible advancements have occurred in my prolonged absence from society!"
> Original Text: "Bruh, that party was straight outta Ohio, no cap. Skibidi vibes only. Tyler’s drip was bussin’, and Jessica was ghostin’ everyone like she hit airplane mode IRL."
I suggest a similar experiment and let some English professors explain the meeting of some contemporary rap songs. I guess they would struggle as well (depending on which song one chooses). Now the professors likely would argue that the rap songs are not relevant, which tells me they (as English professors) are simply not interested how their language evolves.
All that to say it's difficult to read and understand texts that are from a culture you're not familiar with. And I would argue that one can be perfectly fine as an English major in the US not being familiar with Dickens.
Is it possible that the whole thing is explained by incentives?
Getting a four year college degree is a mandatory rite of passage into the middle class these days.
It almost doesn't matter what you do as long as you get the piece of paper and you can move on with your life. Everybody's incentives are aligned: the school will graduate you and make their money, the students will get their degree, and eventually a job, the employers.. well, not sure, but I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious.
"I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious"
That signal is pretty weak, though. Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
Depends on what my incentives are on the hiring end. Many jobs default to requiring a college degree, and hiring someone without one would require a lot of extra work on my end. Also hiring a high school grad over a college grad would involve me putting my reputation on the line by implicitly vouching for them. If the high school kid can't do the job I will get blamed for the bad hire since I broke the procedures put in place to prevent such a thing from happening. I the college graduate sucks at the job, well these things happen, you did what you could.
it's interesting to try to guess *how* the mistakes got made as they are
e.g. in "as if ... , and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" that subject saw the comma as the end of hypothetical - and meeting a dinosaur isn't that strange in our contemporary storytelling. "This is too strange" failsafe has disappeared?
"addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" - I have no idea if subject didn't know what advocate is, but advocate being an animal wouldn't be strange nowadays (in fantasy).
"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall" - I managed to misread this sentence twice: first with "Michaelmas' term" (as in someone's term in power) and then "inner hall". Had I been the one explaining, I'd say "I have no idea who these 2 are, but I'll wait later in the text to find out that mystery"... Point against me, I guess?
Also, it's a bit sad that "-saurus" doesn't get recognized as dinosaur anymore :(
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but my personal, internal, experience - is that I would skip (at least in my mind) the text that was displayed in here. I'd want to find who is the hero, and what's the plot about - letting the "it was muddy, but in 1000 words" pass me by
Go follow @nyttypos and you will find that the 'best' journalists in the world at the NY Times make 50+ published grammar, style guide, factual, and comprehension errors per day. Example: 73 errors yesterday...
Weak article and weak paper. A more accurate title is: English majors from two Kansas universities had trouble understanding vocabulary words used in a 19th century British novel, such as Michaelmas term, mire, and blinkers.
Rubbish - they could look up any unfamiliar terms. Look at how they understood the dinosaur reference. I do find the level of reading quite shocking – it’s not a difficult passage, and I’m not at all well-read in this area of literature.
I am - hard to be a life long avid reader in the UK and not read Dickens at some point.
I found his books worth reading (and considered in their context as a reaction against the unfairness of society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience.
That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country to do that well on Dickens because that is simply not the modern style of written/spoken English but they are English majors so you would expect the overall level to be higher than the general population as a whole.
In the UK reading is on the decline and what people read has fundamentally changed (I'm not competent to say why but to me at least it feels like we have a horrible streak of anti-intellectualism that runs across society).
Well I found it to be a bit confusingly written, so it didn’t surprise me that some students at average/below average universities had trouble.
Furthermore it certainly doesn’t validate the title of “English majors can’t read,” but of course without that this piece couldn’t latch on to the pseudo-outrage trend at how everyone is supposedly dumb.
Would you expect that 19% could not read contemporary English at the level expected of a 10th grader?
To establish a baseline, they had the students first take a standardized reading comprehension test, the Degrees of Reading Power test, designed for the 10th grade level. Almost all the students scored above 80, indicating they read at or above a 10th grade level.
Are you a native English speaker? "whiskers" is a common euphemism for a moustache. I would be very surprised if a native speaker didn't know that, or couldn't infer from context.
> Are you a native English speaker? "whiskers" is a common euphemism for a moustache. I would be very surprised if a native speaker didn't know that, or couldn't infer from context.
It's not euphemism, whiskers are literally what a moustache is made from. A whisker is an individual male facial hair.
"They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms"
Vocabulary is not a problem. I read foreign texts to learn languages as well as very old texts, and it's easy to look up an unfamiliar word to learn it.
The trouble understanding isn't the issue - the lack of curiosity is. They're English majors, on an education level whose purpose is to teach you how to learn. They did not learn or wante to learn, they guessed.
Ignorance is fine, unwillingness to admit you don't know and lack the will to learn is not IMO.
Or maybe college English majors aren’t familiar with archaic meanings of common words like “retired” and “wonderful” that are used differently than they were 175 years ago?
I can’t read Les Miserable in its original French (despite 5 years of high school French class), but I love it in translation. Does that make me functionally illiterate?
I guess my point is that maybe there is a conflation here of breadth of vocabulary and comprehension. Does my inability to understand a Drake dis track mean that I’m illiterate?
Yeah, I’m not sure when “illiterate” stopped meaning “unable to read” and started meaning “doesn’t possess a broad vocabulary on every arbitrary subject, including archaic words from foreign countries”. I’m not sure I like this new definition.
Granted, domain or general knowledge is important in reading comprehension; I kinda know what a megalosaurus is but had no idea what Michaelmas Term was.
But, you can only gain that by having a broad interest and reading a lot in the first place. Call me grandpa but over the past 100 years or so of radio, TV, then internet, people have been reading less and less, so naturally reading comprehension has gone down too.
Flip it around and have an avid reader watch a modern gaming video and you'd see similar poor comprehension I suspect.
In the study, the subjects have access to both reference books and phones to allow them to look these things up. I didn't know Michaelmas Term either and looked it up while I was reading.
I am doubtful that this is about people not reading as hard and often. Alternate hypothesis: the problem is that people are not thinking as hard and often.
If someone gave this test to me, and I was volunteering my time and it didn’t matter to my grades/etc, no chance in hell I’m going to look up every single term I don’t know. I’m a busy person and I’ll just say “meh, it’s some old English thing that I’m sure will be explained through context in later paragraphs, and if I got through the whole first chapter of the book and it turned out to be an important word, I’d look it up. Next question please.”
According to the authors I’d be “functionally illiterate.”
> the problem is that people are not thinking as hard and often.
Modern language as understood by modern readers doesn’t require you to think as hard, and that’s a good thing. We shouldn’t strive to make language intentionally difficult just so we can feel smug and call those who don’t waste their time on it “illiterate.” Dickens’ prose is a sort of poetry and is more about creating a mental picture. The definition of “michaelmas term” and “lord chancellor” don’t seem like important parts of that paragraph at all. The important thing of the paragraph is for you to read it and get a picture in your minds eye about how dreary and muddy London was then. That’s all. Giving this to readers and saying “If you don’t choose to look up the word michaelmas, you are functionally illiterate” just shows that the authors need to look up what a fucking “study” is supposed to accomplish. Hint: it’s not about stoking the author’s ego.
This is the ranting (disguised as "analysis") of a self righteous English major annoyed that students don't get readings that are written in archaic English. The only person who can't read is the people who can't read the room and understand that this stuff is of zero relevance or usefulness to the vast majority of students. This is like getting mad when people show up for a Italian class and they don't understand the Latin readings you give them.
The article's main point isn't about archaic but rather figurative language.
> These problematic readers, which again comprise 58% of the English majors in the study, cannot differentiate between literal and figurative speech in literature. When they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary, they sometimes leap to fantastical conclusions about the meaning of a passage, as this participant who thinks the mention of “whiskers” refers not to a bearded man but to an animal.
The examples given should be simple to parse for native English speakers, which the subjects were.
>> 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.
Digging into the full paper, as curious what the root cause is presumed to be.
> zero relevance or usefulness to the vast majority of students
these are not your average student; these are _English_ majors. If anyone is supposed to be able to read and understand one of their most famous writers ever, it's them.
The conclusion of the article is that the students are functionally illiterate, not “missing the requisite study we’d hope they would have done on their own by now.”
Sensationalist clickbait bullshit, the entire article. Absolute waste of time.
This is the most ridiculous thing. The leap from deciphering ornate language from an old novel to “literacy” let alone being about to read is silly.
You can always set people up to fail. It’s like you gave some junior frontend engineers some highly optimized fortran from 45 years ago and asked them to explain it to you. Without much of a motivator you would probably conclude “software engineers can’t read code”.
Other than "Michaelmas term", "mire" and "blinkers", the broad meaning of it isn't that hard to understand. The language is fairly modern. That said, I suppose that if some grinning asshole were to have me read it in front of him and then yell at me "Quick! What did that passage mean?", I might stumble.
The problem isn't so much the words themselves, but the structure. No one really writes these kind of lengthy comma-peppered sentences like this today:
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.
A more modern way to write that would be something like:
Mud overflowed the streets, as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth. Would it not be wonderful to meet a Triceratops, forty feet long or so, waddling like a giant lizard up Holborn Hill.
I don't know what reasonable expectations would be for English college majors, but to claim that anyone having trouble understanding this text "can't read" seems rather much.
I believe your modernisation attempt misinterprets the dino reference and its connection to the the previous clause about the floods; should it not rather be something like Mud overflowed the streets, as though the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and it would not be shocking to meet a dinosaur etc. etc.
Although, as the comments on the original post discuss, this does rely on background knowledge that when Dickens was writing, there were popular theories associating dinosaurs with the Biblical flood.
For my part, I confused 'Megalosaurus' with 'Megalodon' and pictured a large shark stranded writhing on Holborn Hill by the sudden loss of its waters; an error which, paradoxically, helped me get closer to the intended meaning (which was, we know now, itself incorrect).
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the Triceratops wouldn't be appropriate here. The point here is that the Megalosaurus was a real-life sea monster. The metaphor in the text is that it would appear that a flood had come and gone - which in prehistoric times, might have deposited a sea monster. No flood actually happened though.
EDIT: Damn, I'm mistaken. Before anyone points it out, the Megalosaurus was a land animal. It was a dinosaur whose bones were first discovered in the 1820s. I got it confused with a Megalodon or Mosasaurus.
I replaced it with a better-known dinosaur because Megalosaurus is not widely known today. I had to do a quick check to verify it actually is a dinosaur.
Looking a bit more, it seems that in 1800s there was the (mistaken) belief that Megalosaurus was amphibian. I thought it was a bit odd to reference a dinosaur there, but it makes more sense now. So to properly understand that reference you need to know about the state of dinosaur knowledge in the 1840s.
>This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities.
I think a major factor in this study is that there aren’t exactly any prestigious universities in Kansas. If they were to repeat the same thing at an elite institution the vast majority of students in any major could understand this.
(Also it’s probably easier to read the whole thing and then go back and explain the meaning in my personal opinion)
Example of words (from another HN comment). Not sure I would way someone not knowing what "Michaelmas term" is means they can't read. I don't know this word (in my defense english isnt my first language).
They were allowed access to Google. If you didn't know what Michaelmas was, and couldn't guess from the 'mas' suffix and the word 'term', then you could just Google it.
I knew all three but I had some advantages - English is my first language, I'm British and mire (Quagmire is still used to describe a bad situation that's hard to escape from as well as it's original meaning - so not a huge leap to what mire is) and blinkers (idiomatically - "he had his blinkers on" is still used for example) are still in use (I wouldn't say common use but not extinct either) and Michaelmas comes from liking history and looking up the term at some point in the last 30 odd years.
No, plenty of articles have been written about “illiterate Ivy League students” lately so it’s not just a problem at non-elite schools. These articles have been popping up a lot lately.
Personally, I disagree with the entire premise because it equates literacy with enjoying classic literature. I don’t. So by this metric, I’m also illiterate. I don’t enjoy flowery prose full of allusions and analogy. I prefer science textbooks over Shakespeare.
Air with the smoke is heavier than air without. If the air with smoke is not sufficiently hotter than the air around (hotter air is lighter) then the air with the smoke goes down relative to surrounding air.
The study in question is... questionable, at best, IMO.
Discussed elsewhere, and a comment there summarized (and led to further discussion) why the study is not as representative as we might assume.
Link below [0], as it's simultaneously far too long to re-post here (especially from mobile), yet well worth the read. That said, for ease of reading, the opening paragraph starts:
There's a lot of awful stuff that has been discussed already, but I feel like some of this is "catastrophized" because the researchers set up the subjects to fail by setting the standards in a way that you wouldn't expect the students to succeed.
I agreed with the rebuttal to the study, and think the study is hardly all it's cracked up to be
I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
> You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
I would rate the amount of specific context necessary to understand a random snippet of kernel code much higher than what you need for that Dickens passage. It's certainly much more dense with metaphor and playful use of language than normal prose, but I don't find it that opaque, even as an non-native speaker.
> The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
Well, yes, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the article. The bell curve at the bottom basically says that the comprehension they were expecting is in the top 3% or so, not the 60% of the general population who "have to get a degree". Add in all the Netflix and TikTok casualties, and the result ceases to be surprising.
> Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
This was a kind of frustrating part of the article. Not catching the reference to the flood, or the age of the dinosaurs is pretty shocking. But not knowing what Lincoln's Inn Hall is?
They seemed to expect the kids to look up every word they didn't know. Which, if they were being paid to do a professional translation that was going to be published somewhere, would be a legit expectation. Expecting people donating their time for a study... not so much.
> They seemed to expect the kids to look up every word they didn't know.
Yes. They are students. They should look up any term they do not know.
Should they prefer guessing based on context? Just ignoring new terms? Assuming any unknown word means "skibidi?"
> most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them
The inability to understand sarcasm on the internet is far worse today than it was 10 years ago, and i don't think this can be explained by the influx of larger audience, because this keeps happening in very niche communities. It's something happening globally, even in non-english countries. my guess is it has to do with the dumbing-down of popular media (the internet) to the point where words are removed and only emoji are left (which severely limits the bandwidth of conversation)
It can be hard to convey sarcasm, especially in writing, and especially when you don't know the actual stance of the person writing.
If I mention "big beautiful tariffs" in a peer group of liberals, they can assume I'm being sarcastic. If I'm posting anonymously on the internet, then who knows, maybe I genuinely reject the economic orthodoxy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
In this context, emoji might actually be helpful in expressing sarcasm. Big beautiful tariffs :roll_eyes:
Aren't emojis short-hand context that lowers reading/writing requirements though?
I could express anything an emoji expresses strictly through words.
But over-relying on emojis might atrophy my ability to do so, over time.
> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
> And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels?
The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
The time constraint wouldn't be an issue if they were comfortable with the passage. You can give them unlimited time and they might provide a sufficient response, or just quit and move along in the study, which also stated in the reading.
And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result, but that's not atypical for me online community, whose denizens are a cut above the rest...
This was also noted in the study:
* [...] However, these same subjects (defined in the study as problematic readers) also believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.
Keep in mind that the students were English majors, so understanding complex classical works might be expected at some point.
> The student is under stress due to their struggle with the passage, which the author isn't taking creative liberties to describe as that's how most people will react.
It doesn't look for me as a satisfactory explanation. Were they stressed because they were forced to think hard, or were they stressed because they were afraid to show their incompetence to a professor? Or maybe some other reason?
If the process of thought makes students stressed, then I don't know what can be done. But if they were afraid of a professor, then this stress factor could be and should be removed. For example, I can imagine how they chose to guess instead of thinking things through because they felt that a long thinking can look bad in professor's eyes. If so then students didn't even tried to read carefully, they were guessing, and the question arise: what the study had measured in this case?
> And, with all due respect, I think you're probably giving yourself more credit for your ability to perform better than these students than what might be the actual result
Why do you think so? I have read the text, I really spent some time on it, because it was hard for me (I mentioned specifically that I was confused for a minute by "but newly" stuffed inside of "had retired"). Then I read samples of students interpretations of the text. I believe that this is enough by itself to believe that I was better. For example, I understood that there was no megalosaurus despite being confused by "but newly". Still I had looked into the original article and had found the interpretation of a "single proficient reader", to compare it with what I've got from the text. The most interesting finding: they completely ignored megalosaurus like I did.
The only catch is I've read just one paragraph, while students were reading more of them, but I don't think it will change the results significantly. I can become bored or overconfident and students can get hang of Dickens' language after a couple of paragraphs so they will show better performance than me, but I don't believe it.
Hypothesis: US students are disconnected from real humans, thanks to social media. Reading is one half of communication, and you need to understand people to understand their intentions through text. A reality built on TikTok feeds is incapable of interpreting the writings of someone who doesn't binge the Web.
> But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels?
Because they can’t pass up the opportunity to dunk on people, is my guess. This whole article is a sham. They’re not measuring literacy, they’re fishing for a sensational conclusion. It was an utter waste of time even reading this article, which I foolishly finished to the end.
> In fact, none of the [problematic readers] ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.
> these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text.
-------------
> I found that a majority of [English majors] had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn’t grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing.
> Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.
I feel there's multiple factors in all of this, but the central spiral could be summarized as corrupting economic pressure on learning that forces schools to reduce rigor for the sake of increasing the passing rate.
There could be an inclusion bias however. Long ago, only a select few students would go to college. If we looked at the test results of 2024 students that also would likely have gone to college had they been in the class of 1960, would we see such a difference?
There's an interesting disconnect between readers who read for the "painting with words" aspect of novels and readers who read solely for the plot.
My first impression on quickly reading that passage is it was very muddy, very very muddy, and nothing plot important had happened yet, but we need dinosaur metaphors to say just how muddy it was.
For someone reading for the plot the text did not contain a lot of information.
How much plot could one or two paragraphs from a wider body of work contain?
We do learn more than it’s just muddy. For example the Lord Chancellor is somewhat introduced. We know the time of year. We know it’s been muddy for a while. We know the time of year. We know some term has finished so it’s likely that less people are around or it is quieter than usual. Whether these are relevant to the whole plot we can’t tell from such a short passage but that is true of any extract.
Doesn't Dickens want us to read the text slowly and imagine a dinosaur stomping around after the flood, horses and dogs dealing with the weather, and all sorts of visuals?
It's not about the amount of words but what is expected by the reader parsing them. The reader is expected to spend a lot of time imagining the non- plot stuff.
One would hope that someone choosing studying literature at university would at least be slightly interested in the literary arts.
However I suspect that 'English' might also end up being the default major for many people who don't particularly know what they want to study and aren't particularly adept or interested in any specific area.
what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication. Painting with words is essential in lit even if you do not notice. Maybe Beethoven writes chord progressions leaves it at that?
but in clarity yours is a STEM technical writing approach. Fine for stem, not fine for an English major. Muddy. Very very muddy. Relevant only to the carriage schedule and whether murderer gets gunk on his boots. True often for ersatz writers and professional emails. But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on. This is also communication by painting. The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
Would you prefer novel by bullet points?
>what you speak of is difference between literature and mere communication.
So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?
>But mud fog BLEAKNESS gestures here maybe to social decay, anomie, listlessness, an eternal stupor, impotence of characters and so on.
That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.
> The painting has a point for the plot AND your pleasure.
There's no need to be so confrontational.
Isaac Asimov is nowhere close to being my favorite writer but I offer this for your amusement. In his autobiography "I, Asimov" he talks about his simple writing style:
>Before Pebble in the Sky was published, Walter Bradbury asked me to do another novel. I did and sent in two sample chapters. The trouble was that now that I was a published writer, I tried to be literary, as I had in that never-to-be- forgotten writing class in high school. Not nearly as badly, of course, but badly enough. Brad gently sent those two chapters back and put me on the right track.
>"Do you know," he said, "how Hemingway would say, 'The sun rose the next morning'?"
>"No," I said, anxiously (I had never read Hemingway) "How would he say it, Brad?"
>Brad said, "He would say, 'The sun rose the next morning.'
>That was enough. It was the best literary lesson I ever had and it took just ten seconds. I did my second novel, which was The Stars, Like Dust-, writing it plainly, and Brad took it.
Parent was a bit over-confrontational and defensive, but I think it suffices to say that there can be many types of art.
Géricault, Mondrian (early and late), and Standard Highway Signs [0] are all art, but with different goals and paths to getting there.
That an author chooses florid prose doesn't make them superior or inferior to others, aside from the skill with which they wield language.
Some people prefer stop signs. Some like The Raft of the Medusa. Plenty of room for everyone.
[0] https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/kno-shs_2024-release-status/index...
Interest. I log in after a while and read post. Asimov is amusing to some but few would call literature. That is fine! I enjoy pop filler.
I like cute anecdote, it has certain use, against purple prose. It is a tool, not a Foundation.
The point "say simply" is in short essays DFW, George Orwell politics and the English language, Schopenhauer, however, they do not simply speak simply.
> So a novel is not literature unless it uses your preferred writing style?
I think your error is extreme literal mind. The plot goes in math function and we solve murder mystery by weighing objects on scales and deducing. Certain are meant to be read in such way, and others not. Literature is not.
Above quote is excellent display as it tries say "your definition of literature is idiosyncratic, you are a dictator of definitions" with big L Liberal towards taste. Who's to say smash piano with hammer not better than Chopin, former is postmodern preference there are no elites here.
> That passage doesn't introduce any "characters". Perhaps Lord Chancellor will turn out to be one of the novel's characters, but that remains to be seen.
Lord Chancellor is already character because he exists as a person in story? Regardless, we can speak about characters without their names, even without speaking, that is what I mean.
I have anecdote Umberto Eco Mouse or Rat to match re literal
"In his notes to a recent Italian translation of Moby Dick the translator, Bernardo Draghi, spends three pages apropos the famous opening line, Call me Ishmael. Previous Italian translators put, quite literally, Chiamatemi Ismaele. Draghi remarks that the original opening line suggests at least three readings: (i) ‘My real name is not Ishmael, but please call me so, and try to guess what my choice means (think of the fate of Ishmael son of Abraham and Agar)’; (ii) ‘My name is not important, I am only a witness of a great tragedy’; (iii) ‘Let us be on first-name terms, take me as a friend, trust my report.’"
"Now, let us assume that Melville really wanted to suggest one or more of those readings, and that there was a reason why he did not write My name is Ishmael (which in Italian would be, literally, ‘Mi chiamo Ismaele’). Draghi’s translation reads Diciamo che mi chiamo Ismaele, which could be roughly translated as Let us say that my name is Ishmael. Even though I appreciate the rest of this translation, I cannot but object that (apart from the fact that the Italian version is less concise than the original), with his choice Draghi has inevitably stressed interpretations (i) and (ii), but has eliminated the third one. If Melville wanted to remain ambiguous – Draghi eliminates part of the ambiguity."
How would Hemingway introduce as Ishmael? Call me Ishmael.
That was a very good summary where some friends and I very much disagreed how much we enjoyed GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire where they praised the detailed descriptions and me being like "He wrote two paragraphs about how the cloak was red, that's one not overly long sentence".
From reading the examples, it just looks like the subjects weren't properly motivated. If you read a hard text and just say the first thing that comes to your mind and immediately continue to the next sentence, of course you're going to do bad. But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
> But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
Pride? Dignity? I wasn't tested but still read the text with the intent to comprehend it. The people tested made nonchalant guesses, but given they were all English students, you'd expect them to have intrinsic motivation / pride.
We must have interacted with very different students in our lives if you think students will put any effort whatsoever in a test whose results have no consequence.
Hell, at my jobs people take pride in hacking their way through security training instead of watching the 5 minute video.
I think pride would push one in the opposite direction: a prideful student wouldn't want to be seen having to look something up in front of the interviewer.
You're talking about college students. They probably (think they) have better stuff to do than help some researcher study how good their english is.
Perhaps what this is actually showing is that college is in, in fact, not for everyone.
But modern incentives force everyone to college.
Thus is gets devalued and it means nothing to have a college degree.
Very nice excuse for poor teaching ability.
In high school I was national laureate of Physics Olympiad. Then I went to college with a mindset that I can learn anything. First week's physics lecture taught me that, no, I can't, if the teacher's attempt at teaching is so abysmal. On the final exam at the end of the semester I ended up with barely passing grade, that I had to fight for at additional verbal exam. The same semester I got top grade with informal plus for excellence in the physics exercise classes where we solved physics problems, because the person teaching those was not terrible at his job.
You pay teachers garbage pay and not evaluate them competitively so you are attracting a lot of not so great people to the profession. Then you just give them students they can't control, let alone teach and never monitor if they actually learn anything during classes. So that's what you get in the end. People who haven't been taught anything but still "passed".
Wanna have educated young adults? Do Finland.
Did no students do well in that class? Maybe the problem was you.
Some did well, some did bad. Completely unsuspicious gauss curve you can easily achieve if you are aiming for it when you grade. Nobody's gonna argue because we signed up for computer science and physics is just there to be passed and forgotten.
Of course the problem was me. I needed to understand to remember. Many people don't need that. They can reproduce completely arbitrary piece of text they were "taught". The grade I got from him was the only non top level semester grade I got in my about nine years of learning physics across five different teachers. And it's not that he hated me or something. We barely interacted. He was just terrible at explaining things and I didn't have a book I could just read instead of trying to understand him. Terrible teacher can make all the difference.
I wonder if they would get the same result with that passage with British-English speakers.
I've never read a Dickens novel, but a lot of the context there seems obvious to me.
That's an interesting question. I was thinking that my Australian English would cope a lot better with this; conversely, I sometimes struggle to cope with American English literature on the first read-through.
I was trying to think what the US equivalent text would be. I don't think US text gets that arcane, though.
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
If I were studying Spanish literature I wouldn't dream of not studying Iberian Spanish literature
While a valid point I don't think it is expecting too much for an English major to be familiar with the literature of the country of origin of the language they're studying?
I guess the big question is where in their study are they? I'm assuming it's perfectly possible to get through high school in the US without ever studying any 19th century UK literature. I certainly got through school in England without studying any US literature at all.
If we're talking students a few weeks into their first term at University then it is not at all surprising that they've never read any literature from England. If on the other hand they're a few weeks from graduating, then it would be much more surprising.
Yeah valid. I was thinking last year of undergraduate to post-grad.
A fair point.
There they go with Dickens again. Why always Dickens? Haven't we suffered enough?
Original Text: "Bruh, that party was straight outta Ohio, no cap. Skibidi vibes only. Tyler’s drip was bussin’, and Jessica was ghostin’ everyone like she hit airplane mode IRL."
Dickens: "Upon my soul! The tale describes an occasion in Ohio, indeed a peculiar land, from the inference here. 'No cap,' evidently suggests none of the attendees wore hats—perhaps a custom or rule strictly enforced for reasons unknown. Fascinating! Now, these 'Skibidi vibes' I take to indicate an exotic form of music or perhaps a ceremonial dance, unique to these Ohio gatherings.
And concerning young Master Tyler—his 'drip was bussin’'—it is clear he suffered from an alarming medical condition! Possibly a wound that would not cease bleeding, creating quite the tragic spectacle. Yet, the narrator sounds oddly approving; perhaps there is some honorable valor attached to enduring such afflictions publicly.
Lastly, Miss Jessica, 'ghostin’ everyone,' seemingly invoked spiritual manifestations or perhaps vanished mysteriously, akin to an apparition. Her going into 'airplane mode IRL' must surely mean she fled swiftly, flying away in a vehicle capable of flight. Extraordinary! What incredible advancements have occurred in my prolonged absence from society!"
> And concerning young Master Tyler—his 'drip was bussin’'—it is clear he suffered from an alarming medical condition!
I would think Dickens would draw parallels to snuff drip rather than a wound.
He wouldn't know what an airplane is.
He died in 1870, I'm sure he had an idea of what an airplane was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_steam_carriage#/media/F...
> Original Text: "Bruh, that party was straight outta Ohio, no cap. Skibidi vibes only. Tyler’s drip was bussin’, and Jessica was ghostin’ everyone like she hit airplane mode IRL."
Finally, words I can understand
Dickens was paid by the word. Better he had been paid by the word not written.
I suggest a similar experiment and let some English professors explain the meeting of some contemporary rap songs. I guess they would struggle as well (depending on which song one chooses). Now the professors likely would argue that the rap songs are not relevant, which tells me they (as English professors) are simply not interested how their language evolves.
All that to say it's difficult to read and understand texts that are from a culture you're not familiar with. And I would argue that one can be perfectly fine as an English major in the US not being familiar with Dickens.
Is it possible that the whole thing is explained by incentives?
Getting a four year college degree is a mandatory rite of passage into the middle class these days.
It almost doesn't matter what you do as long as you get the piece of paper and you can move on with your life. Everybody's incentives are aligned: the school will graduate you and make their money, the students will get their degree, and eventually a job, the employers.. well, not sure, but I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious.
"I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious"
That signal is pretty weak, though. Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?
Depends on what my incentives are on the hiring end. Many jobs default to requiring a college degree, and hiring someone without one would require a lot of extra work on my end. Also hiring a high school grad over a college grad would involve me putting my reputation on the line by implicitly vouching for them. If the high school kid can't do the job I will get blamed for the bad hire since I broke the procedures put in place to prevent such a thing from happening. I the college graduate sucks at the job, well these things happen, you did what you could.
I should have been more specific about what I meant :)
Your answer is reasonable but, it's entirely about the principal-agent problem.
What if you were the boss, and you were accountable only to yourself and your family?
Realistically, I would weight the two educations as roughly equal and judge on other factors.
If I had to choose between:
A) Someone with a 4-year degree in English, from Pittsburg State (one of the two colleges in that study), and
B) Someone who just finished high school, and got a high SAT score.
Then I'd choose B. (Being a graduate of Pittsburgh State suggests an SAT score in the range 900 to 1200.)
Are we hiring an 18-year-old, or deciding between two similarly aged candidates with those educational backgrounds?
I'm assuming you mean the same age, correct?
No, I'm talking about either:
- an 18-year-old with a good SAT score, or
- a 22-year-old who graduated from Pittsburgh State, after majoring in English
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44072878
it's interesting to try to guess *how* the mistakes got made as they are
e.g. in "as if ... , and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" that subject saw the comma as the end of hypothetical - and meeting a dinosaur isn't that strange in our contemporary storytelling. "This is too strange" failsafe has disappeared?
"addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" - I have no idea if subject didn't know what advocate is, but advocate being an animal wouldn't be strange nowadays (in fantasy).
"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall" - I managed to misread this sentence twice: first with "Michaelmas' term" (as in someone's term in power) and then "inner hall". Had I been the one explaining, I'd say "I have no idea who these 2 are, but I'll wait later in the text to find out that mystery"... Point against me, I guess?
Also, it's a bit sad that "-saurus" doesn't get recognized as dinosaur anymore :(
---
but my personal, internal, experience - is that I would skip (at least in my mind) the text that was displayed in here. I'd want to find who is the hero, and what's the plot about - letting the "it was muddy, but in 1000 words" pass me by
Go follow @nyttypos and you will find that the 'best' journalists in the world at the NY Times make 50+ published grammar, style guide, factual, and comprehension errors per day. Example: 73 errors yesterday...
https://x.com/nyttypos/status/1925538255862173810
Weak article and weak paper. A more accurate title is: English majors from two Kansas universities had trouble understanding vocabulary words used in a 19th century British novel, such as Michaelmas term, mire, and blinkers.
Rubbish - they could look up any unfamiliar terms. Look at how they understood the dinosaur reference. I do find the level of reading quite shocking – it’s not a difficult passage, and I’m not at all well-read in this area of literature.
I am - hard to be a life long avid reader in the UK and not read Dickens at some point.
I found his books worth reading (and considered in their context as a reaction against the unfairness of society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience.
That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country to do that well on Dickens because that is simply not the modern style of written/spoken English but they are English majors so you would expect the overall level to be higher than the general population as a whole.
In the UK reading is on the decline and what people read has fundamentally changed (I'm not competent to say why but to me at least it feels like we have a horrible streak of anti-intellectualism that runs across society).
Well I found it to be a bit confusingly written, so it didn’t surprise me that some students at average/below average universities had trouble.
Furthermore it certainly doesn’t validate the title of “English majors can’t read,” but of course without that this piece couldn’t latch on to the pseudo-outrage trend at how everyone is supposedly dumb.
They were allowed to use their phones to look up words they did not know.
I don’t think that would have been very useful, as Victorian English is typically written in a style that seems alien to modern ears.
Perhaps a better title still would be: English students had difficulty understanding a passage written in a different culture and time.
Which seems completely normal and expected to me. The issue is in defining “English” as too broad of a term.
Would you expect that 19% could not read contemporary English at the level expected of a 10th grader?
Look up "whiskers," is a kind of cat. In what world does "whiskers" mean "bearded man"?
Are you a native English speaker? "whiskers" is a common euphemism for a moustache. I would be very surprised if a native speaker didn't know that, or couldn't infer from context.
> Are you a native English speaker? "whiskers" is a common euphemism for a moustache. I would be very surprised if a native speaker didn't know that, or couldn't infer from context.
It's not euphemism, whiskers are literally what a moustache is made from. A whisker is an individual male facial hair.
It’s not that rare of a word, but I wouldn't say it’s particularly common either. Definitely not a common word amongst anyone under the age of 40.
I accept the ambiguity there, but the mention of “voice” and “interminable brief” are more than enough to coax you to the right interpretation.
> Are you a native English speaker?
Nope
> Look up "whiskers"
ok: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=whisker...
Whiskers are a mustache. It's not a kind of cat, it is the antenna hairs that cats have around their nose.
Oh you're right
"They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms"
Vocabulary is not a problem. I read foreign texts to learn languages as well as very old texts, and it's easy to look up an unfamiliar word to learn it.
The trouble understanding isn't the issue - the lack of curiosity is. They're English majors, on an education level whose purpose is to teach you how to learn. They did not learn or wante to learn, they guessed.
Ignorance is fine, unwillingness to admit you don't know and lack the will to learn is not IMO.
Not individual words, but what the text conveys. Also how to approach (digest) unfamiliar content.
Or maybe college English majors aren’t familiar with archaic meanings of common words like “retired” and “wonderful” that are used differently than they were 175 years ago?
I can’t read Les Miserable in its original French (despite 5 years of high school French class), but I love it in translation. Does that make me functionally illiterate?
If you were studying French literature at a university in France, it might be slightly concerning.
I guess my point is that maybe there is a conflation here of breadth of vocabulary and comprehension. Does my inability to understand a Drake dis track mean that I’m illiterate?
Yeah, I’m not sure when “illiterate” stopped meaning “unable to read” and started meaning “doesn’t possess a broad vocabulary on every arbitrary subject, including archaic words from foreign countries”. I’m not sure I like this new definition.
no
It might be an interesting development of the study to test the comprehension of engineering and then science students on the same passages.
Granted, domain or general knowledge is important in reading comprehension; I kinda know what a megalosaurus is but had no idea what Michaelmas Term was.
But, you can only gain that by having a broad interest and reading a lot in the first place. Call me grandpa but over the past 100 years or so of radio, TV, then internet, people have been reading less and less, so naturally reading comprehension has gone down too.
Flip it around and have an avid reader watch a modern gaming video and you'd see similar poor comprehension I suspect.
In the study, the subjects have access to both reference books and phones to allow them to look these things up. I didn't know Michaelmas Term either and looked it up while I was reading.
I am doubtful that this is about people not reading as hard and often. Alternate hypothesis: the problem is that people are not thinking as hard and often.
If someone gave this test to me, and I was volunteering my time and it didn’t matter to my grades/etc, no chance in hell I’m going to look up every single term I don’t know. I’m a busy person and I’ll just say “meh, it’s some old English thing that I’m sure will be explained through context in later paragraphs, and if I got through the whole first chapter of the book and it turned out to be an important word, I’d look it up. Next question please.”
According to the authors I’d be “functionally illiterate.”
> the problem is that people are not thinking as hard and often.
Modern language as understood by modern readers doesn’t require you to think as hard, and that’s a good thing. We shouldn’t strive to make language intentionally difficult just so we can feel smug and call those who don’t waste their time on it “illiterate.” Dickens’ prose is a sort of poetry and is more about creating a mental picture. The definition of “michaelmas term” and “lord chancellor” don’t seem like important parts of that paragraph at all. The important thing of the paragraph is for you to read it and get a picture in your minds eye about how dreary and muddy London was then. That’s all. Giving this to readers and saying “If you don’t choose to look up the word michaelmas, you are functionally illiterate” just shows that the authors need to look up what a fucking “study” is supposed to accomplish. Hint: it’s not about stoking the author’s ego.
This is the ranting (disguised as "analysis") of a self righteous English major annoyed that students don't get readings that are written in archaic English. The only person who can't read is the people who can't read the room and understand that this stuff is of zero relevance or usefulness to the vast majority of students. This is like getting mad when people show up for a Italian class and they don't understand the Latin readings you give them.
The article's main point isn't about archaic but rather figurative language.
> These problematic readers, which again comprise 58% of the English majors in the study, cannot differentiate between literal and figurative speech in literature. When they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary, they sometimes leap to fantastical conclusions about the meaning of a passage, as this participant who thinks the mention of “whiskers” refers not to a bearded man but to an animal.
The examples given should be simple to parse for native English speakers, which the subjects were.
>> 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.
Digging into the full paper, as curious what the root cause is presumed to be.
> zero relevance or usefulness to the vast majority of students
these are not your average student; these are _English_ majors. If anyone is supposed to be able to read and understand one of their most famous writers ever, it's them.
The conclusion of the article is that the students are functionally illiterate, not “missing the requisite study we’d hope they would have done on their own by now.”
Sensationalist clickbait bullshit, the entire article. Absolute waste of time.
I'd agree for the general population. But if you can't read English Literature and you are studying English Literature, that's pretty bad.
I'd expect someone majoring in Classics to understand Latin.
Wow. Just wow. Please check your coping mechanisms at the door.
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This is the most ridiculous thing. The leap from deciphering ornate language from an old novel to “literacy” let alone being about to read is silly.
You can always set people up to fail. It’s like you gave some junior frontend engineers some highly optimized fortran from 45 years ago and asked them to explain it to you. Without much of a motivator you would probably conclude “software engineers can’t read code”.
Other than "Michaelmas term", "mire" and "blinkers", the broad meaning of it isn't that hard to understand. The language is fairly modern. That said, I suppose that if some grinning asshole were to have me read it in front of him and then yell at me "Quick! What did that passage mean?", I might stumble.
I like that Dickens mentioned the Megalosaurus.
The problem isn't so much the words themselves, but the structure. No one really writes these kind of lengthy comma-peppered sentences like this today:
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.
A more modern way to write that would be something like:
Mud overflowed the streets, as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth. Would it not be wonderful to meet a Triceratops, forty feet long or so, waddling like a giant lizard up Holborn Hill.
I don't know what reasonable expectations would be for English college majors, but to claim that anyone having trouble understanding this text "can't read" seems rather much.
I believe your modernisation attempt misinterprets the dino reference and its connection to the the previous clause about the floods; should it not rather be something like Mud overflowed the streets, as though the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and it would not be shocking to meet a dinosaur etc. etc.
Although, as the comments on the original post discuss, this does rely on background knowledge that when Dickens was writing, there were popular theories associating dinosaurs with the Biblical flood.
For my part, I confused 'Megalosaurus' with 'Megalodon' and pictured a large shark stranded writhing on Holborn Hill by the sudden loss of its waters; an error which, paradoxically, helped me get closer to the intended meaning (which was, we know now, itself incorrect).
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the Triceratops wouldn't be appropriate here. The point here is that the Megalosaurus was a real-life sea monster. The metaphor in the text is that it would appear that a flood had come and gone - which in prehistoric times, might have deposited a sea monster. No flood actually happened though.
EDIT: Damn, I'm mistaken. Before anyone points it out, the Megalosaurus was a land animal. It was a dinosaur whose bones were first discovered in the 1820s. I got it confused with a Megalodon or Mosasaurus.
I replaced it with a better-known dinosaur because Megalosaurus is not widely known today. I had to do a quick check to verify it actually is a dinosaur.
Looking a bit more, it seems that in 1800s there was the (mistaken) belief that Megalosaurus was amphibian. I thought it was a bit odd to reference a dinosaur there, but it makes more sense now. So to properly understand that reference you need to know about the state of dinosaur knowledge in the 1840s.
>This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities.
I think a major factor in this study is that there aren’t exactly any prestigious universities in Kansas. If they were to repeat the same thing at an elite institution the vast majority of students in any major could understand this.
(Also it’s probably easier to read the whole thing and then go back and explain the meaning in my personal opinion)
Reading comprehension isn't a skill you'd expect to be limited to students at elite institutions.
> Michaelmas term, mire, and blinkers.
Example of words (from another HN comment). Not sure I would way someone not knowing what "Michaelmas term" is means they can't read. I don't know this word (in my defense english isnt my first language).
They were allowed access to Google. If you didn't know what Michaelmas was, and couldn't guess from the 'mas' suffix and the word 'term', then you could just Google it.
I knew all three but I had some advantages - English is my first language, I'm British and mire (Quagmire is still used to describe a bad situation that's hard to escape from as well as it's original meaning - so not a huge leap to what mire is) and blinkers (idiomatically - "he had his blinkers on" is still used for example) are still in use (I wouldn't say common use but not extinct either) and Michaelmas comes from liking history and looking up the term at some point in the last 30 odd years.
No, plenty of articles have been written about “illiterate Ivy League students” lately so it’s not just a problem at non-elite schools. These articles have been popping up a lot lately.
Personally, I disagree with the entire premise because it equates literacy with enjoying classic literature. I don’t. So by this metric, I’m also illiterate. I don’t enjoy flowery prose full of allusions and analogy. I prefer science textbooks over Shakespeare.
Can someone explain why smoke would be lowering down? Is it not supposed to go up?
Miserable weather often comes with an inversion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology)
Air with the smoke is heavier than air without. If the air with smoke is not sufficiently hotter than the air around (hotter air is lighter) then the air with the smoke goes down relative to surrounding air.
Maybe this [1] can, after all I think the concept was kind of named from conditions in London way back.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog
Oh I get it now, so it was going out of the chimney and lowering down onto the street, not going down the chimney into the house.
The study in question is... questionable, at best, IMO.
Discussed elsewhere, and a comment there summarized (and led to further discussion) why the study is not as representative as we might assume.
Link below [0], as it's simultaneously far too long to re-post here (especially from mobile), yet well worth the read. That said, for ease of reading, the opening paragraph starts:
There's a lot of awful stuff that has been discussed already, but I feel like some of this is "catastrophized" because the researchers set up the subjects to fail by setting the standards in a way that you wouldn't expect the students to succeed.
I agreed with the rebuttal to the study, and think the study is hardly all it's cracked up to be
[0] https://tildes.net/~humanities/1nz8/they_dont_read_very_well...
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TL;DR?