I do not know what it is, but there’s something about reading on a screen that makes sustained attention difficult. I skipped about halfway through that passage. In print, I’d be fine.
With "Bleak House," it was also originally published in a magazine as a serial, so the original audience wouldn't have read it as a single book. The kind of luxurious descriptions that Dickens uses make more sense if you have a whole month between chapters to savor them.
It was also written in a time with no photography and no television. The author used their prose to describe things that a common persons eyes had never seen. Today with these things plus the internet, everyone has seen an Elephant or a Cossack or Mt. Fuji. Authors don't take three or four paragraphs to describe something except for maybe Stephenson.
Precisely. I am also wondering about what kind of "literacy" the students would have in "reading," for example, a music video. I suspect they would see more than their professors.
I was just thinking this! I have made it a point never to read the Great Books on a screen — including excerpts — because my eyes just glaze over. I am not sure what it is, really — whether the eye-drying computer glow, the temptation to click off to verify some piece of information, limited self-discipline, short attention span, or all of the above — but computers make it nigh impossible to engage with the Great Books thoughtfully, intentionally, and deeply.
Like much else on the Internet, the engagement is superficial and swift.
It's the media difference at the level McLuhan tried to describe: the medium itself is the message, so when we read on screens that throw light in our eyes it is different from reading a page illuminated by the sun or an electric lamp.
For me, it is also the sense that you have no idea online in the scroll how long something is. It helps to save as pdfs, which have a clearer length, even onscreen.
I think that what not a lot of people appreciate about reading comprehension, especially when it comes to literature, is that it's not a binary. There are different degrees of being able to appreciate what's going on in a passage of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel, but it takes a lot of years to get there. Even a lot of English grad students who read a Shakespeare play frequently look down at the textual notes at the bottom of the page to help them understand the line they just read. You kind of have to read a LOT of Elizabethan English before you get to be fluent enough in the grammar and the vocabulary that you don't really need most of the textual notes (a lot more than most English majors, even those who focus a lot on the Early Modern period will read). But it's a very rewarding experience when you do get to that point.
But it's similar with Dickens, even though Victorian British English is a little more familiar to a 21st century reader than Elizabethan English. This is sort of fresh in my mind because I've been reading Martin Chuzzlewitt for the first time. It takes a certain degree of exposure to be able to appreciate the subtler aspects of Dickensian humor.
Understanding and enjoying literature basically requires a willingness to immerse yourself in it. But if it's presented as a (somewhat ill defined) job skill, that doesn't necessarily give people the reason to undergo that process of immersion. The only way is to be genuinely interested and to really want to experience these kinds of texts.
Yes! You're so very right. I took a class in the Canterbury Tales this semester and I can attest to the truth of your comment. In fact, one of the foci of our class were the ways in which Chaucer teaches us to be better readers.
I'll just copy and paste what I wrote regarding this:
I thought I knew how to read. Well, I know how to read superficially and can even maybe mine through a text to its heart – it is just a matter of luck. The first evening I walked into class, I was afraid I would not understand Middle English, though I had read Peter G. Beidler’s A Student Guide’s to Middle English during winter break and taken a medieval class in college. Besides, I was not deterred by Chaucerian sentence structure; it was similar to Spanish (subject-verb inversion, double negative, etc.). Of course, I didn’t know then that sentence structure would be the least of my worries. I armed myself with Norman Davis’ A Chaucer Glossary, consulted the glossary in the back of the Riverside, and sounded out words. When I really, really could not figure out a line, I would peek at the Harvard translation, but I only did this under extreme duress, when words would start to swim meaninglessly on the page. I take pride in my ability to persevere in a “foreign” tongue, and I was determined to have sovereignty over Chaucer. Sure, at first it would take me hours to get through each tale (the Knight’s Tale took me a day), but as weeks passed, I found myself becoming more and more fluent in Middle English such that I didn’t even need to resort to the glossary much. Alien contractions and expressions soon became as familiar as the bed I sleep in. Sometimes I would even find myself guessing the right meaning of a word just by looking at the context around it. I didn’t always get it right, but I was trying. It was the same process I followed when I was learning to read English decades ago. Here I was, not only learning English a second time, but also learning to read.
By the way, I'm a graduate student in literature. I've been living in the U.S. since I was 10, and I taught myself English by reading anything I could get my hands on. I've been lucky that this has facilitated my understanding of texts my peers might find difficult, like The Faerie Queene. I grew up hearing what I think is an outmoded form of Spanish, and the "outmoded" English is honestly familiar to me.
The "outmoded" English that you are recognizing is the baseline Latin underneath the poetry. You might enjoy Ernst Curtius's book on this: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
If I might offer up another aspect of this. Within the last month, I was in discussions with a publisher about a novel of mine. The publisher told me that he liked it but that his editor was concerned that I "had a lot of long sentences." I pressed as to whether they were bad or incomprehensible. No, just long.
To see if we could come to some sort of common ground, I agreed to allow the editor free rein on one of my chapters. After his edit, I would then assess whether the end result wasn't too much of an affront to my artistic sensibilities. Obviously, as the writer, I am attached to my own vision, but I could admit that there was nothing wrong with the edited product. It was grammatically correct, and he did catch a continuity error where a character in a chair sat yet again, but all of the rhythm and flow I had tried so hard to craft was gone. Unusual words were stricken. Sentences were chopped into fairly uniform length. To my eyes, it had all the charm of a tech manual. We respectfully agreed that the gap between author and editor was too great to bridge.
And I'm talking about a baseball novel, not esoteric ponderings on some Gnostic cult of yesteryear peppered with archaic language and idiosyncratic syntax. Everything is forcing not just the reader but the writer into ever more infantile language.
The standards used to set "reading level" involve length of sentences, so the publishers play that game, too. This has been a feature of American education since the 1940s.
That is a hilarious passage, in its ways. Scathing, at least. But yes. It doesn’t function like a mathematical equation, but like a vine all wound upon itself, all over the place but with one root.
It seems that underappreciated causes of the poor reading skills of students are also:
1. All institutions no longer serve the public. They serve the people who work in them and the powers that be. It is much easier to turn out students with poor reading comprehension than to buck societal trends and turn out truly literate young adults. After all, teachers get paid the same either way and lower standards enable administrators to more easily achieve goals.
2. No one in their lives cares if they are literate. All that matters are grades, getting any checklist points for college admissions and being popular.
3. Self confidence has been raised to a top priority in teaching kids. These kids might not be literate but they have the self confidence to not see why they should be more literate because they are wonderful as they are.
I remember my first reading of Bleak House as a university student, long before smart phones existed. The stuff in the introduction about Michaelmas Term, Chancery, the Lord Chancellor, Lincoln's Inn, etc. as well as some nautical terms, are all very specific cultural items that 21st century Americans simply cannot and should not be expected to know. I understand that the students were able to look them up on their phones. Still, I as a very good and interested student, in the 1990s, probably struggled with those paragraphs before fully understanding them. It's part of the learning process.
The framing is everything. I wonder how well the professors in Victorian literature would do on the texts that I have my students read from the 12th and 13th centuries?
The confusion of literacy (the ability to read and write) with reading comprehension (perhaps these have been flattened into one another) is bothersome indeed. Seems related to treating schools like education factories (with a poor definition of education) on the low end (k-12) or a magic system for creating more valuable humans on the extreme (where value is how much cash you can generate) side (collage or more collage, university) of materialism.
What if the horrifying truth is that when we fail to use k-12 as social formation to the local group and college as a filter, we flood the world? Thus, the number of people who understand a text (or can continue to find more in a good text) is the same rato it has always been? Hierarchy would become hidden, perhaps. Experts would be difficult to discern. Anyone who saw one thing you did not might be seen as all knowing.
As I told you once before, Professor, I will never catch up to all the reading you've done. But reading your post makes me want to read Lord of the Rings again. After all, I have read it only once. That was when I was well into adulthood and already dulled by all the annual reports I read and write. I read it because my kids were reading it and I was being left out of dinner conversations. I've never been attracted by tales of other worlds and fantasy and didn't expect to enjoy the books. But I did. Simply because the prose is so beautiful.
If a professor can answer it, more students will read. Or at least those who read will grow from the process if what they are reading is good for the Good. A lot of what the students are asked to read is also slop.
Based on the way the students were reading, I think they are mainly trained to read for bullet points so that they can make more money. If only someone had written a novel about what it means to reduce people's lives to paperwork.
Wasn't Dickens read aloud to labourers in the 19th century? Have we devolved that badly, or has language changed so much that it takes a greater level of literacy to understand Dickens today than back then?
Bear, you don't get it. 21st century American "education' (from the Latin "educere" - to lead out of) is purposed not with teaching the traditional three "R's" becuz that would simply continue the system of Oppression (vs the Oppressed) the educational establishment was created to perpetuate.
No, the revised US classroom, molded to the vision of Brazilian Marxist Paolo Friere (further inspired no doubt by Tribesmen like Horkheimer and Marcuse) in his *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* and *The Politics of Education* - two of the most quoted sources of education major scholarly papers - creates little activistas against the Oppressor. They can barely read, count to 100, or write their name in cursive, but oboy, they on command will file out of the classroom like Orwell's irrepressible office and factory workers, to die-in on the state Capitol steps for gunz, Gaza, or never-Trump.
We old folks let it happen, and our grandkids will have to live with the result.
In competitive marksmanship, there is a concept known as "natural point of aim." If you get into a shooting position that is twisted away from the center of the target, your bullet will go not where you want it to, where you think you are aiming, but to where your body position dictates, Until you realize it and reorient your body into the correct position and natural point of aim.
Western Civilization has, for several generations, been twisted out of its natural point of aim - towards productive holiness and the face of God, by progressive leftists who crawled out of the ideological sewers of Europe and Asia, towards the vision of the Father of Lies and Chaos. As Herbert Marcuse said in one of his memoirs, seeing the Statue of Liberty, he never felt so free and comfortable anywhere else, but it still all had to be destroyed.
But rants like yours and other green shoots I see gives me hope the larger culture is recognizing that it's been twisted out of position, and thus hitting the wrong mark for way too long. And starting a preference cascade towards the natural point of aim that was intended.
Please do...principles and thoughts that are gifts from God (and a good Army NCOIC of the VMI Rifle Team ca. 1972-73) are meant to be shared.
BTW...one discerns natural point of aim by getting into position, putting sights on the target, close eyes, breathe and relax...then, open eyes and see where the sights have drifted. Reposition, lather, rinse, repeat until the sights are settled where you want them to be.
Then BRASS....breathe, relax, aim, slack, squeeze.....bang.
I do not know what it is, but there’s something about reading on a screen that makes sustained attention difficult. I skipped about halfway through that passage. In print, I’d be fine.
With "Bleak House," it was also originally published in a magazine as a serial, so the original audience wouldn't have read it as a single book. The kind of luxurious descriptions that Dickens uses make more sense if you have a whole month between chapters to savor them.
Also if you’re paid by the word. *cynical smile*
People get paid for words?!! Truly we live in a fallen age. ; )
It was also written in a time with no photography and no television. The author used their prose to describe things that a common persons eyes had never seen. Today with these things plus the internet, everyone has seen an Elephant or a Cossack or Mt. Fuji. Authors don't take three or four paragraphs to describe something except for maybe Stephenson.
Precisely. I am also wondering about what kind of "literacy" the students would have in "reading," for example, a music video. I suspect they would see more than their professors.
I was just thinking this! I have made it a point never to read the Great Books on a screen — including excerpts — because my eyes just glaze over. I am not sure what it is, really — whether the eye-drying computer glow, the temptation to click off to verify some piece of information, limited self-discipline, short attention span, or all of the above — but computers make it nigh impossible to engage with the Great Books thoughtfully, intentionally, and deeply.
Like much else on the Internet, the engagement is superficial and swift.
It's the media difference at the level McLuhan tried to describe: the medium itself is the message, so when we read on screens that throw light in our eyes it is different from reading a page illuminated by the sun or an electric lamp.
For me, it is also the sense that you have no idea online in the scroll how long something is. It helps to save as pdfs, which have a clearer length, even onscreen.
I think that what not a lot of people appreciate about reading comprehension, especially when it comes to literature, is that it's not a binary. There are different degrees of being able to appreciate what's going on in a passage of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel, but it takes a lot of years to get there. Even a lot of English grad students who read a Shakespeare play frequently look down at the textual notes at the bottom of the page to help them understand the line they just read. You kind of have to read a LOT of Elizabethan English before you get to be fluent enough in the grammar and the vocabulary that you don't really need most of the textual notes (a lot more than most English majors, even those who focus a lot on the Early Modern period will read). But it's a very rewarding experience when you do get to that point.
But it's similar with Dickens, even though Victorian British English is a little more familiar to a 21st century reader than Elizabethan English. This is sort of fresh in my mind because I've been reading Martin Chuzzlewitt for the first time. It takes a certain degree of exposure to be able to appreciate the subtler aspects of Dickensian humor.
Understanding and enjoying literature basically requires a willingness to immerse yourself in it. But if it's presented as a (somewhat ill defined) job skill, that doesn't necessarily give people the reason to undergo that process of immersion. The only way is to be genuinely interested and to really want to experience these kinds of texts.
You get it. The professors’ “test” was a dinosaur slopping through the mud of making money in Chancery. As it were.
Yes! You're so very right. I took a class in the Canterbury Tales this semester and I can attest to the truth of your comment. In fact, one of the foci of our class were the ways in which Chaucer teaches us to be better readers.
I'll just copy and paste what I wrote regarding this:
I thought I knew how to read. Well, I know how to read superficially and can even maybe mine through a text to its heart – it is just a matter of luck. The first evening I walked into class, I was afraid I would not understand Middle English, though I had read Peter G. Beidler’s A Student Guide’s to Middle English during winter break and taken a medieval class in college. Besides, I was not deterred by Chaucerian sentence structure; it was similar to Spanish (subject-verb inversion, double negative, etc.). Of course, I didn’t know then that sentence structure would be the least of my worries. I armed myself with Norman Davis’ A Chaucer Glossary, consulted the glossary in the back of the Riverside, and sounded out words. When I really, really could not figure out a line, I would peek at the Harvard translation, but I only did this under extreme duress, when words would start to swim meaninglessly on the page. I take pride in my ability to persevere in a “foreign” tongue, and I was determined to have sovereignty over Chaucer. Sure, at first it would take me hours to get through each tale (the Knight’s Tale took me a day), but as weeks passed, I found myself becoming more and more fluent in Middle English such that I didn’t even need to resort to the glossary much. Alien contractions and expressions soon became as familiar as the bed I sleep in. Sometimes I would even find myself guessing the right meaning of a word just by looking at the context around it. I didn’t always get it right, but I was trying. It was the same process I followed when I was learning to read English decades ago. Here I was, not only learning English a second time, but also learning to read.
By the way, I'm a graduate student in literature. I've been living in the U.S. since I was 10, and I taught myself English by reading anything I could get my hands on. I've been lucky that this has facilitated my understanding of texts my peers might find difficult, like The Faerie Queene. I grew up hearing what I think is an outmoded form of Spanish, and the "outmoded" English is honestly familiar to me.
The "outmoded" English that you are recognizing is the baseline Latin underneath the poetry. You might enjoy Ernst Curtius's book on this: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Thank you for the recommendation! I added it to my Amazon cart. Should prove a fruitful reading!
If I might offer up another aspect of this. Within the last month, I was in discussions with a publisher about a novel of mine. The publisher told me that he liked it but that his editor was concerned that I "had a lot of long sentences." I pressed as to whether they were bad or incomprehensible. No, just long.
To see if we could come to some sort of common ground, I agreed to allow the editor free rein on one of my chapters. After his edit, I would then assess whether the end result wasn't too much of an affront to my artistic sensibilities. Obviously, as the writer, I am attached to my own vision, but I could admit that there was nothing wrong with the edited product. It was grammatically correct, and he did catch a continuity error where a character in a chair sat yet again, but all of the rhythm and flow I had tried so hard to craft was gone. Unusual words were stricken. Sentences were chopped into fairly uniform length. To my eyes, it had all the charm of a tech manual. We respectfully agreed that the gap between author and editor was too great to bridge.
And I'm talking about a baseball novel, not esoteric ponderings on some Gnostic cult of yesteryear peppered with archaic language and idiosyncratic syntax. Everything is forcing not just the reader but the writer into ever more infantile language.
The standards used to set "reading level" involve length of sentences, so the publishers play that game, too. This has been a feature of American education since the 1940s.
That is a hilarious passage, in its ways. Scathing, at least. But yes. It doesn’t function like a mathematical equation, but like a vine all wound upon itself, all over the place but with one root.
You've got me thinking about mathematical equations now... Vine-like... Hmm...
Sound familiar?
Re-adjustment by C.S. Lewis
https://youtu.be/0cb8LVLUjKQ
Yup
It seems that underappreciated causes of the poor reading skills of students are also:
1. All institutions no longer serve the public. They serve the people who work in them and the powers that be. It is much easier to turn out students with poor reading comprehension than to buck societal trends and turn out truly literate young adults. After all, teachers get paid the same either way and lower standards enable administrators to more easily achieve goals.
2. No one in their lives cares if they are literate. All that matters are grades, getting any checklist points for college admissions and being popular.
3. Self confidence has been raised to a top priority in teaching kids. These kids might not be literate but they have the self confidence to not see why they should be more literate because they are wonderful as they are.
Exactly. The students are learning what they are taught: to fill in the Excel charts with "data."
And how to copy from AI
Get them young, hook them hard, give them ready access to the goods and they'll be on the hard stuff for life.
Books.
They will legit prefer the book-in-hand to screens and go back to it, even in the age of the pocket moloch.
Good post.
I remember my first reading of Bleak House as a university student, long before smart phones existed. The stuff in the introduction about Michaelmas Term, Chancery, the Lord Chancellor, Lincoln's Inn, etc. as well as some nautical terms, are all very specific cultural items that 21st century Americans simply cannot and should not be expected to know. I understand that the students were able to look them up on their phones. Still, I as a very good and interested student, in the 1990s, probably struggled with those paragraphs before fully understanding them. It's part of the learning process.
The framing is everything. I wonder how well the professors in Victorian literature would do on the texts that I have my students read from the 12th and 13th centuries?
My first inclination was that "Current Year AF" meant something else.
Which would still have been appropriate, under the circumstances.
Indeed.
The confusion of literacy (the ability to read and write) with reading comprehension (perhaps these have been flattened into one another) is bothersome indeed. Seems related to treating schools like education factories (with a poor definition of education) on the low end (k-12) or a magic system for creating more valuable humans on the extreme (where value is how much cash you can generate) side (collage or more collage, university) of materialism.
What if the horrifying truth is that when we fail to use k-12 as social formation to the local group and college as a filter, we flood the world? Thus, the number of people who understand a text (or can continue to find more in a good text) is the same rato it has always been? Hierarchy would become hidden, perhaps. Experts would be difficult to discern. Anyone who saw one thing you did not might be seen as all knowing.
The factory model is the problem. What if we taught reading as a *craft* rather than as something made on a production line?
As I told you once before, Professor, I will never catch up to all the reading you've done. But reading your post makes me want to read Lord of the Rings again. After all, I have read it only once. That was when I was well into adulthood and already dulled by all the annual reports I read and write. I read it because my kids were reading it and I was being left out of dinner conversations. I've never been attracted by tales of other worlds and fantasy and didn't expect to enjoy the books. But I did. Simply because the prose is so beautiful.
The professors I quote were judging their students’ reading of “Bleak House” as if it were one of the reports you read. Bleak, indeed!
It is a tool and we should ask "what is it for?"
If a professor can answer it, more students will read. Or at least those who read will grow from the process if what they are reading is good for the Good. A lot of what the students are asked to read is also slop.
Based on the way the students were reading, I think they are mainly trained to read for bullet points so that they can make more money. If only someone had written a novel about what it means to reduce people's lives to paperwork.
And to drain people's pockets in the process so that by the end, you wonder "What was the point?"
Beautifully said!
Wasn't Dickens read aloud to labourers in the 19th century? Have we devolved that badly, or has language changed so much that it takes a greater level of literacy to understand Dickens today than back then?
We talked about this in tonight’s livestream—it’s mainly a problem of framing, plus the way we “code” literacy.
Bear, you don't get it. 21st century American "education' (from the Latin "educere" - to lead out of) is purposed not with teaching the traditional three "R's" becuz that would simply continue the system of Oppression (vs the Oppressed) the educational establishment was created to perpetuate.
No, the revised US classroom, molded to the vision of Brazilian Marxist Paolo Friere (further inspired no doubt by Tribesmen like Horkheimer and Marcuse) in his *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* and *The Politics of Education* - two of the most quoted sources of education major scholarly papers - creates little activistas against the Oppressor. They can barely read, count to 100, or write their name in cursive, but oboy, they on command will file out of the classroom like Orwell's irrepressible office and factory workers, to die-in on the state Capitol steps for gunz, Gaza, or never-Trump.
We old folks let it happen, and our grandkids will have to live with the result.
I'm not letting it happen, even if it does mean sweeping the desert. Or trying to clear the streets of mud left behind after the waters retired.
In competitive marksmanship, there is a concept known as "natural point of aim." If you get into a shooting position that is twisted away from the center of the target, your bullet will go not where you want it to, where you think you are aiming, but to where your body position dictates, Until you realize it and reorient your body into the correct position and natural point of aim.
Western Civilization has, for several generations, been twisted out of its natural point of aim - towards productive holiness and the face of God, by progressive leftists who crawled out of the ideological sewers of Europe and Asia, towards the vision of the Father of Lies and Chaos. As Herbert Marcuse said in one of his memoirs, seeing the Statue of Liberty, he never felt so free and comfortable anywhere else, but it still all had to be destroyed.
But rants like yours and other green shoots I see gives me hope the larger culture is recognizing that it's been twisted out of position, and thus hitting the wrong mark for way too long. And starting a preference cascade towards the natural point of aim that was intended.
I love this image. “Natural point of aim”—I’m remembering this!
Please do...principles and thoughts that are gifts from God (and a good Army NCOIC of the VMI Rifle Team ca. 1972-73) are meant to be shared.
BTW...one discerns natural point of aim by getting into position, putting sights on the target, close eyes, breathe and relax...then, open eyes and see where the sights have drifted. Reposition, lather, rinse, repeat until the sights are settled where you want them to be.
Then BRASS....breathe, relax, aim, slack, squeeze.....bang.
Good shooting, Bear....
It is a Marshall McLuhan-level problem: how to read books in the age of the scroll?