Original: https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read
Archive: https://archive.is/qlL6u
95% or so of the tested English majors in Kansas state universities could not parse three leading paragraphs of Dickens Bleak House. First paragraph of same is below:
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.
Breakdown of the readers in the study:
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58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
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38% could understand about half of the sentences
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5% could understand all seven paragraphs
Money quote:
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.
These are the people who presume to morally lecture you online. Never forget it.
Irony being, I fucking loved reading as a kid up until my mid 20s. I would shotgun hundreds of pages a day out of huge novels if I was enjoying them.
But any book assigned in an English class was always so mindnumbing and terrible that it would slow to barely a chapter an hour because I'd have to just keep going back to re-read because I was not absorbing anything. I'm still fuming to this day about Desert Solitaire, and I credit Edward Abbey in that book with implanting me with a hatred of environmentalism from a young age by simply being insufferable, hypocritical, and just awful.
It almost feels like reverse psychology with how consistent they are in picking books that accomplish the opposite of whatever they want.
Somewhat ironically given recent news about the show being cancelled it was the Wheel of Time books that were the tipping point for me getting into reading properly as like yourself until then a lot of the reading infront of me had been set for a class so I had zero motivation or enjoyment for any of it. Even then I only started the Wheel of Time books originally because I was in a uni roleplaying group and in my first year someone was running a WoT skin of D&D 3.5. The GM was a fan of the book series and had the official WoT RPG books which helped things, and was understandably upset when Jordan died since the series wasn't finished. Don't think I ever got his thoughts on how Sanderson did finishing things but for me it did then mean the introduction to Sanderson and his own works so a long and winding road through reading all because of pen and paper RPG.