331–334 of 334 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dickens' sentence structure was just as difficult to parse then as it is now This is nonsense. Dickens was an enormously popular writer with common readers.
How are these statements contradictory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I would not have done much better. >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 li…
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.