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:

• 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read

• 38% could understand about half of the sentences

• 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.