That’s the preface, the study in question dealt with the opening of Chapter 1
“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.”
reading this : reading books intended for transmitting information = swimming through molasses : swimming through water
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.
[0] https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2101
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/molasses-flood-ph...
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.
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?
In my defence, I'm not a native speaker
Like how I text. To my wife. Whenever we're on our computers in different locations. No need to edit. She gets it. So do you.
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.
You have unrealistic expectations of the average person's ability to read complex literature and the vocabulary necessary to parse this piece of text.
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?
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?
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
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 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.
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
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.
Unsurprising that readers must be encouraged to improve their attention spans. ("Git gud at readin'")
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.
On another note: What are horse blinkers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs
The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry...
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.
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.
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.
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.