College English majors can't read
kittenbeloved.substack.com
kittenbeloved.substack.com
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".
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.
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.
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?"
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)
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:
I could express anything an emoji expresses strictly through words.
But over-relying on emojis might atrophy my ability to do so, over time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hell, at my jobs people take pride in hacking their way through security training instead of watching the 5 minute video.
But modern incentives force everyone to college.
Thus is gets devalued and it means nothing to have a college degree.
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.
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've never read a Dickens novel, but a lot of the context there seems obvious to me.
If I were studying Spanish literature I wouldn't dream of not studying Iberian Spanish literature
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.
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!"
Finally, words I can understand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_steam_carriage#/media/F...
I would think Dickens would draw parallels to snuff drip rather than a wound.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
I'm assuming you mean the same age, correct?
- an 18-year-old with a good SAT score, or
- a 22-year-old who graduated from Pittsburgh State, after majoring in English
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
Nope
It's not euphemism, whiskers are literally what a moustache is made from. A whisker is an individual male facial hair.
ok: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=whisker...
whiskers
n 1: the hair growing on the lower part of a man's face [syn: beard ...]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.
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.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.
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.
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).
Ignorance is fine, unwillingness to admit you don't know and lack the will to learn is not IMO.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Sensationalist clickbait bullshit, the entire article. Absolute waste of time.
I'd expect someone majoring in Classics to understand Latin.
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”.
I like that Dickens mentioned the Megalosaurus.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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...