One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
“A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.”
There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.
“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 itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means.
In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them.
>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.
What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone?
Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around.
Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around.
Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean.
Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
This seems like something way beyond reading comprehension though.
Personally, and this is not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there.
Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
You're dug in, but none of this is what the linked paper is about (perversely).
It's about students who are literally unable to parse sentence structure and grasp what's being described in a scene—ones who think that Michaelmas Term is the name of a character and that the image of a hypothetical Megolasaurus walking up the street is an actual dinosaur in the scene.
Try reading the paper linked here to see what the discussion is about, rather than (as the authors of the paper criticize) just guessing at what they should have meant.
In general, I think that's a perfectly valid view for you to take. It's not the only one, but it's a valid one.
In specific, this study was a test of reading comprehension, for English majors at a university level. They should be expected to do better with a complicated sentence then "it's really foggy, I guess". Just as I expect someone in film school to be able to give a more detailed review of a movie than "It was pretty good, you should go see it", even though that may be a perfectly acceptable review if a friend gives that to me.
I don't know why you're yes-anding the premise. For this sentence the authors of the study would have been rather more interested whether the subjects would look up the term "aits".
Aside from that, there's actually isn't a lot more to it, which makes it an unfortunate sentence to focus on, because it results in a caricature of the study. "There's just fog everywhere" and "the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city" are just barely short of the desired results. It just happens that this mostly straightforward (not complicated) sentence lies between/among many other far less straightforward ones. The problem is glossing where it is inappropriate to do so—and being overly comfortable doing so—which the authors of the study criticize as "oversimplification":
> 96 percent of the problematic readers used oversimplified phrases at
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[…] Those subjects,
however, who relied on oversimplification became more and more lost as
they continued to read
Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.
I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings.
The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.
Anecdata: I found most people don't have an issue with the vocabulary itself but rather their attention spans. From what I've experienced from family members and friends, the younger ones seem to get exasperated by any longer amount of text that isn't in very simple English language.
A friend told me his daughter was one of the few that could actually sit through a whole reading session in her 2nd grade class. And these are mostly pick and choose books so not really forced literature they don't enjoy.
I think it's very reasonable to expect that a majority (if not all) of university students to be able to read this but certainly not the general public.
You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
I suspect a majority of the population has no idea what "Michaelmas term" is. And there's some other phrases in there that require some familiarity with things commonplace in the 19th century that aren't so in the 21st century.
Count me among those who have no idea when Michaelmas is, but does it really matter? The next sentence tells you it is sometime around November. The whole passage is laden with overlapping context clues.
It’s a helpful detail that Dickens wrote for his Victorian readers. Michaelmas term refers to both the first academic term of the school year and the start of the legal year in the English courts system. Bleak House is about a court case that has gone on so long that nobody knows what it’s about. The case is about an inheritance and has dragged on for so long that the estate itself has been totally wiped out by legal fees. It has ruined lives and continues to ruin them but there is no end in sight even though there’s nothing left but fighting to fight over. It’s an inherited lawsuit and an inherited feud.
Dickens had a lot of issues with the legal system at the time and it was a protest work.
Toward the end of the story the fighting does stop when lawyer's fees, which they had been charging to the estate, at last empty it. This is announced publicly in court, and the attorneys respond by flinging their piles of paper into the air, one of a few comic scenes in the novel.
FYA, this modus vivendi is still being practiced -- see the litigation around the estate of O.J. Simpson.
One example student in the study does not look it up and misinterprets "Michaelmas Term" as a person, presumably because it has "Michael" in it. Knowing it is even a time is half the battle.
How does November help? I don't even remember the academic terms from my college 10 years ago, how am I supposed to accurately know how academic terms worked a century ago in England?
Well then I guess it was an unseasonably warm December that year? Or perhaps the dates have changed? Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that it makes a significant difference to the story.
They were given a dictionary, and also told they were allowed to look things up on their phone.
I suspect that the unfamiliarity with words like Michaelmas was part of the point.
I.e. What do the students do when reading a book and they come across a word they don't know? Look it up? Deduce it's rough meaning from context? Live with the uncertainty? Get mad and not finish the text?
Everything is deadly when it floods, with water floods being responsible for about half of all deaths from global natural disasters [0].
The Wikipedia article you linked to describes the event but says nothing about swimming through it. There's a Scientific American article that analyzed this based on the Reynolds number [1] and arrived at a conclusion that you can't swim through molasses via regular symmetric motions and would need something different, which sounds quite appropriate for the analogy.
I'm not a native speaker, but I feel this isn't that hard to read? Maybe not if I was in a wrong headspace, but I can get the gist looking at it.
Question would be, what is Michaelmas? My first thought would be it's a prime minister or president, but I'd need to ask for context. If so, their term has just finished and there's a change in govt.
Also, weather sucks so much and it's so muddy, the streets resemble more of some prehistoric places :P
Holborn Hill is some place, part of me would say it's a street, English naming is weird.
Also I'd say that the role of those sentences is retardation to slow the reading down and to paint a dreary picture.
Unless I'm falling into a trap and overestimating my comprehension.
Michelmas is a holiday in September. Michelmas term is a British school term (fall term, I guess) and apparently also means the beginning of the legal year.
When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole.
The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a Wooly Mammoth waddling up the hill would make for a better picture.
Bleak House was first serialized in 1852. The famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs were commissioned in 1852 and first shown to the public in 1854. The timing lines up with dinosaurs being something new and exciting to the readers.
Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages.
The preface is much more circuitous and difficult than the opening of Chapter 1. The opening of Chapter 1 is very vivid and descriptive, but pretty straightforward, even the archaic stuff in it you really should be able to guess at from context.
Is it the easiest thing to read? No.
Should university English majors be able to read it? Good grief, yes, this is such a wildly low bar.
Since other commenters seem to think that the passage is just the first paragraph of chapter 1 (the fact of which suggests its own meta-commentary on the content of the article), it's worth mentioning that the passage is the first seven paragraphs of chapter 1, in which there are definitely some challenging sections, particularly in the later paragraphs.
Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable.
A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms.
The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too.
I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
Lmao, this is the "swimming through molasses"? We're done for.
I know it's a cliche but algorithmic social media has destroyed our attention spans and our ability to think; LLMs are on their way to destroy what's left.
It's a very depressing study overall: " When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own."
I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers, and my list will quickly start to include folks who are more mathematicians, like Chebyshev. And we have the advantage that we literally use equations named after these guys!
Names are trivia, imo. The memorization of trivia is… it happens of course, but it is just a symptom of learning.
> I don’t think I could name many 19’th century engineers
Unlike engineering, the whole English literature curriculum in high school is built around reading particular works by particular historical writers. The highlights of nineteenth-century literature should have been well covered in high school (and beyond - some of these people are seniors in college!). An English major who cannot remember any works or authors from the nineteenth century would be equivalent to engineering major who can't remember any algebra.
Random funny story (presented with a devious agenda of course)—I tutored folks in an “math for non-stem majors” sort of math class in college. I was pretty good at it generally (I think as an engineering student I was closer to their material than the math students, who’d all long ago moved on to the big-brain stuff). But at some point they started asking about foils, which was pretty confusing (they weren’t looking for anachronistically named projector slides, challenging me to a duel, or preserving their lunch). It turns out FOIL is a mnemonic for applying the distributive property twice, which I’d never seen, having just remembered the underlying thing directly.
I wonder if these college English students have similarly forgotten some names? I guess that’s sort of a long shot. I do think memorization of facts should be avoided, though, whenever it is possible to instead integrate the underlying principle into your mental model instead.
Ignoring the first three, the rest I've mentally bucketed into "inventor" and not "engineer". And that's assuming I have them associated with the right century - definitely would have excluded the Wright brothers anyway because of that.
>
The aircraft we fly today is the same design as the Wright Brothers. They solved the control problem. They did wind tunnel studies. And yet you claim they're "not engineers."
As the joke goes, 'I want some of what he's smoking.' Just. Wow.
When did I ever claim they're not engineers? I said I mentally bucketed them into "inventor" instead of "engineer". People can be more than one thing at once, it's just not the association I have in my mind, so they don't come to mind when I try to think of engineers.
This study can't see past its own midwit view that there is an objective “detailed, literal” reading that necessarily produces the same interpretation of the text that the authors have.
The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?
This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself:
- one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea?
- the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader?
- they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)
I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.
It reminds me of the now-infamous article that ran in the New York Times a few years ago that argued we should remove the requirement to complete an Algebra course in order to earn a high school diploma.
The bar for any amount of academic discipline or rigor may as well be a stripe of masking tape on the floor.
Have you read the passage in question? While I would expect English students to be able to work through it it’s not an easy task and would almost certainly require some kind of reference for the anachronistic terms and historical context (which, admittedly, I think the students in the study were allowed, though few took advantage of it).
Even worse, there are a lot of writers I know who go through the publishing process and the first person to actually read the manuscript is the copy editor. You’d think people in publishing read, but no…
If an adult English speaker cannot understand the opening of Bleak House - quotes given elsewhere in this thread - they are effectively unable to access the bulk of English literature.
This is not someone who belongs in a university English course, this is someone in need of remedial English lessons.
They were not asked to read a book, they were asked to read 7 paragraphs aloud and then answer questions about it. It would have been nice if the study had a control group of students who sat down and read the same passage to themselves, we interpret for different things when reading aloud and we have no idea how that affected the study but for the study's purpose of highlighting issues with teaching (not proving students are illiterate) the lack of this control group is not a huge issue.
English students are students, they are in school to learn things they don't know, not demonstrate what they already know. Looking at the numbers it goes from 0% proficient as freshman to 50% as juniors, drops with seniors but seniors often seem to be an outlier in these sorts of studies, probably because they have a great deal on their mind with the major changes their life is about to undergo.
It really is, students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English that they don't read, write, or speak; that makes reference and uses turns of phrase that would be well-understood by readers at the time but are archaic to a modern reader.
If you did that same exact passage but had someone transliterate it into modern English like "foot-passengers" -> "pedestrians" I bet the results would be perfectly acceptable. Why would you test literacy, a very practical skill, using anything other than contemporary language, the kind that they actually
use in their day to day?
This is a common and convenient narrative but it's never been true. Readers then didn't have twice the short-term memory or 'context window' of people now. Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now. If anything it was harder since students now should have a better education. People make this same argument with Shakespeare as if Victorian era people spoke the same way as his characters do, which isn't true either. They had trouble then too, but (fewer) people could still do it. Now it's a stone wall.
Also, testing literacy isn't about if people can read road signs or not. It's about whether people can take a larger text and derive meaning. Understanding differing perspectives is directly correlated to intelligence and empathy, it makes better voters. But even if that's not important (it is) the study was measuring English students, so reading is quite literally their occupation for at least those four years.
* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?
* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?
* Does the reader know a
bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?
To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second.
It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.
An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to
better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.
They aren't. A run-on, 70 word sentence for example wasn't easier to store in your head, or not require the occasional second read-through back then . Readers then still had to go through all of that. This "it's just outdated" idea is employed primarily to hand-wave poor literacy performance and reading requirements.
Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and has a lot of the same difficulty, but people don't call it 'outdated' or treat it like a foreign language. These are just books you have to read slower than a news article, and that's alright, but there's a fine line between needing more time and not being able to get through it. That study showed it conclusively.
Yes, he was popular, and his works still weren't as easy to read as some of his contemporaries and many authors before and after him. That's not nonsense, that's reality.
To clarify, the study [0] mentioned in TFA and referenced by GP did not test literacy in the sense, "can this person read English?" Rather, it tested whether students had attained a level of "proficient-prose literacy," which equates to a score of 33+ on the Reading portion of the ACT.
A 33 on the ACT is a very good score (it's out of 36). The students were English majors, so it does not seem unreasonable to test whether they are proficient in this area. What exactly is the expectation when they pick up King Lear, or The Canterbury Tales?
> students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English
They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House. It's pretty much standard English.
> 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 snow-flakes � gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
The only word I see there that isn't used the same way in bog standard American English is "wonderful." I will grant you that "Michaelmas" is obscure to an American, but "Michaelmas Term [] over" is clear enough: it's a specific span of time that has elapsed. You don't need to know exactly what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is any more than if you read
> I went to Carnegie Deli
and didn't know what Carnigie Deli is. It's obviously a deli.
To understand the passage and what follows, it is actually important to know what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is. And to be clear, it's not an "inn" in the standard modern usage of the term, but rather a rather a professional association for lawyers.
You can figure out from later context that it's some kind of legal institution with an associated court. The students were also allowed to look things up: "Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource" [0]
Yes, agreed completely. You can get a lot (but not everything) from context. The text will be clearer if you look up unfamiliar terms (which they were allowed to do). But if you gloss over Lincoln's Inn Hall as "obviously some kind of inn", you won't have a full understanding of what follows.
I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too.
“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,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”
Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
The only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses that archaic meaning of “divers” that I’m only familiar with because of the Joanna Newsom time travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.
Comparison is not metaphor. Ironically metaphor is actually something LLMs are somewhat adept at picking up on provided there's enough training data saying there's a metaphor there, for a seminal work.
Whatever you may wish to call it, simile or metaphor, it's a little silly to complain about it being referred to as a metaphor, considering that similes are a subset of metaphor, even if they often aren't taught this way to children. Also, in common speech and literature, what would be taught as similes to children are almost universally just referred to as metaphors.
I don't see what's missing from Claude's summary. Claude doesn't repeat the word "loom", but does explain that Dickens is comparing the appearance of the lamps to that of the sun.
