Every now and then, someone online reminds me that Metafilter still exists, and I sigh and give a little thanksgiving that not everything from the good old days has been strangled by monopsonists or smothered in AI slop. This afternoon I bumped into a reference to a MeFi thread on reading skills, which thread (and the paper that occasioned it) occupied an hour or so of reading and pondering.
As somebody who has taught reading and writing skills for nigh on to thirty-five years, my experience both confirms and diverges from both the initial paper and the consequent discourse. (When I say ‘taught reading skills’ I refer to the close reading of biblical texts, and when I say ‘[taught] writing skills’ I mean ‘marked papers and tried to help students improve them’.)
On the whole, the extent of the Discourse that concerned whether Bleak House was a good or bad instance of writing missed the point. Some people will read the beginning of Bleak House well, and others won’t. It’s not some absolute indicator of anything, but one may as well use Bleak House as most any other literary sample. I can see some value to choosing another source as a comparison — let’s say, The Magnificent Ambersons, whose first paragraph reads:
Major Amberson had “made a fortune” in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland dog.
But let it be Bleak House, and without letting ourselves be drawn into ‘Who is a competent reader?’ or ‘Is that appropriate research methodology?’ ask, ‘What do we learn from the results of the experiment?’
The researchers note that some readers adopted the unfavourable tactic of ‘oversimplifying’: ‘The most common was oversimplifying — that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic statement.’ May we mark this as a notable characteristic, the weakness of which one can understand by seeing it as a transition from specific (and often ‘vivid’) to generic? I’ve seen this in decades of some students’ essays on biblical passages. Rather than focusing on the specifics and explaining what effects the details bring about, they remove detail and specificity and substitute generality. In the example from Bleak House, students abstract the general phenomenon of ‘muddiness’ from the descriptions and metaphors that convey the extremity of the mud’s accumulation. How does the paragraph work? By giving several different accounts of the amount of mud, how it got where it is, and to what one might compare it. Or just say, ‘Well, it’s really muddy.’
‘The second most commonly used tactic by problematic readers was guessing.’ Some students in biblical interpretation do this as well — if I ask, ‘What do you mean when you say X?’ or ‘Can you tell me what this term you used means?’ I encounter awkward silences. Not all of this amounts to guessing per se; sometimes it’s just assuming that everyone knows what the term means (so they can use it whether they know it or not) or that they didn’t really understand their claim, but they put it forward in the hope that it would pass unnoticed. Sometimes it’s deliberate bluffing, but much of the time I suspect that it’s inadvertent bluffing, assuming that one’s guess has substance and going forward on that basis, only to discover that their tutor expects them to be able to articulate the grounds for their assumption (or guess). One can easily avoid this by looking up unfamiliar phrases or by testing claims that one finds in a source against other related sources, but that’s time-consuming, it may not have been rewarded at earlier levels of study, and it runs counter to some students’ lack of interest in owning their claims to knowledge.
The authors identify the third problematic gesture that the paper cites as ‘giving personal reactions to the text instead of trying to interpret it.’ I encounter this less often than the ‘specific > abstract’ trajectory and the ‘guess/assumption’, but it too appears in the pages of biblical students’ essays. They change direction from interpreting the text to connecting it to the text’s implications for their doctrinal or spiritual or social or logical concerns. Close reading doesn’t dispense with these concerns, but it puts a higher value on developing a rich appreciation of what the text does and how it does it.
Does all this mean, in the terms of the authors of the paper, that some of my students ‘can’t read’? I wouldn’t say so; rather, I would say that they read to a level of complexity that matches the expectations their settings put on them. If no one has ever asked that they look up unfamiliar terms before they use them (or ‘when they first read them’) in order to attain a sturdier grasp on the ideas in play, very few will extend themselves off their own bat. They inhabit demanding environments in which the extra effort to look up unfamiliar terms has not enhanced their satisfaction in life very much. Especially if they encounter this criterion for the first time in undergraduate life, they have years of their own academic experience that has inculcated the sense that knowing a degree more about their topic than they had to in the past doesn’t bring any particular advantage. Why bother?
So, sure those students can read. They do it all the time. They may not enjoy reading in depth, they may not yet have acquired the skills or inclination to read in depth, they may not (in some cases) have the capacity to read in depth. They may not read very well, and the first paragraphs of Bleak House may put them off (such that they perform less well than they might with another text), and they may not realise just what their examiners expect of them.
I should read MeFi more often.