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What's happening to reading?

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Re: What's happening to reading?

#21

Post by anzumitsu »

easterncalculus wrote: post #11

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.

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).

Re: What's happening to reading?

#23

Post by anzumitsu »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #18
easterncalculus wrote: post #11

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.” Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenbe…

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

Re: What's happening to reading?

#24

Post by neuroplots »

easterncalculus wrote: post #11

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.

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…

A landmark study of this, pertaining to literary agents, was just published today: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/literary-agents-dont-read-h...

Re: What's happening to reading?

#25

Post by MichaelRo »

Well, when I was a kid in the 80s in communist Romania, life was a lot similar to 19th century than what someone in Western countries was experiencing. No TV (obviously no computers), so most significant form of entertainment came from reading primarily. I never read "classics" or the books that were on school's compulsory list but I did read anything I could get my hands on and looked entertaining. I recall seeing the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065207/ first time, some time after the fall of communism and invasion of cable TV and thinking, "I know this story!" because I read the book like 5 times, without knowing there's a movie too.

Anyhow, short answer to: "What's Happening to Reading?": it's being replaced by video content as primary source of entertainment. Main drive behind mass reading was amusement, not practicality. Now that amusement no longer requires (much) reading, the general level of literacy of the public is not exceeding that.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#26

Post by jasonthorsness »

anzumitsu wrote: post #23
jasonthorsness wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.” Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenbe…

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

I like it

“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.”

Re: What's happening to reading?

#27

Post by bee_rider »

easterncalculus wrote: post #19
bmiekre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gave a literal LOL

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 fiel…

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.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#28

Post by ryandv »

anzumitsu wrote: post #23
jasonthorsness wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.” Not too bad throughout, just a lot of embedded asides/commentary https://www.gutenbe…

That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1

I still don't see the issue. Do people really have difficulty reading this level of English?

Re: What's happening to reading?

#29

Post by edavison1 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #20
retskrad wrote: post #17

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes th…

Your comment is very well-written, which is usually a sign of someone highly literate and well-read. I'm very curious about your story as an "intermediate reader" with "500 hours" of reading under your belt. TIA for any further details you're willing to share.

I don't know if you're alluding to it and I just missed the sarcasm but their comment is at least partially computer generated. Last sentence is classic bot talk coded.

Re: What's happening to reading?

#30

Post by haiku2077 »

anzumitsu wrote: post #21
easterncalculus wrote: post #11

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.

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).

Someone posted it below and it doesn't seem that difficult. One old use of the word "wonderful" was all that threw me off
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