While much of this is relevant and troubling, the Bleak House example is a bit of a fallacy. The illiterate masses loved Dickens read aloud and no doubt understood his prose because his references were familiar to them. Modern readers find him difficult not because his writing is particularly dense but because he's writing in a language they do not speak. I would also question how much anyone ever understood Dickens, whose writing was verbose even then, as he was often paid by the word.
So much this! I hated Shakespeare as a student until my teacher actually had us *watch* his work performed. With the acting and the words, intent became much clearer - I still didn’t understand all the references but at least I knew what was supposed to be funny!
With Dickens, I really loved his books as a teen because my mom showed me movies based on his work. It was easier to follow the language better when I knew the plot more. The language was a barrier to understanding but not enjoyment once I saw it as intended!
The language drift is more obvious with Shakespeare, but it's still very much there for Dickens, Austen and Shelly. Technically speaking they're all in modern English, but some words have changed over time and others have fallen out of use.
And in Jane Austen's case the pop culture references she liked to make have fallen out of memory.
Yeah - I think I just grew up in South Africa where Dickens was still cannon (along with the others mentioned, but also people like Hardy)
The register felt approachable. My English teacher read the opening chapter of great expectations in the original and abridged versions solely to deride the latter.
I read Dickens in school in the US, but my teacher would make vocabulary lessons out of it and used it as a jumping off point for the idea of language drift before we read Shakespeare.
I remember one of my English teachers telling us that using the “new English” translations provided in our Macbeth book next to the original text was cheating! 😂 and they wonder why kids don’t find learning Shakespeare enjoyable.
I mean, you do lose things in those versions, like how people in upper classes speak in iambic pentameter while poor characters speak in prose. Part of the study of Shakespeare is studying the poetry of it all and you do lose that when it's put into modern English.
My school's required versions had the original version on one side and the "modern translation" on the other. Although my teacher said she would prefer we only use the modern version if we got stuck.
I read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school and enjoyed them well enough, but I love watching Shakespeare performed. I have a running list of every play I've seen and am hoping to see them all before I die. It's completely watching it (great fun) to reading it (incomprehensible).
That link says he was paid by installment… which seems being paid by the word but with more steps? Like the point is that the man wrote in a very wordy style, and he probably wouldn’t have been so verbose if he got paid a flat fee per story.
Not really. He dragged out his stories in terms of plot, yes, but in terms of his prose the verbosity isn’t all that different from many writers of the early Victorian era. It’s like dragging out episodes of a serialized TV show—the show doesn’t get wordier, but the plot spins in place (e.g. *Lost*).
If Dickens was much more verbose than his contemporaries, he likely wouldn’t have become very popular, in the same way an author today who is much wordier than his or her contemporaries wouldn’t be a great success—people would get bored. So instead, he got audiences hooked using plot convolutions.
You're probably right. The crazy plot extensions were the serial TV series of their day. He was also very funny, sometimes in ways that we don't notice today. Like all the ridiculous names he gave the characters.
Actually, most nineteenth century writers were equally verbose. Balzac, James, Melville, Dostoyevsky - they are all wordy writers. One of the largest innovations of early twentieth century writers is writing in a sparser way that conveyed the bleakness of their times.
I think the underlying “problem” is that we have broadened the availability of “advanced” education to so many people that the standards have declined. I think it’s an open question whether that’s a net positive. It’s certainly more egalitarian, however.
I’m sure Dr. Zhivago being the best-selling novel of the year back in the 1960s or whenever was a sign that most novels were being bought and read by a narrower subset of the population, for example. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it good or bad that a wider swathe of the population can read adequately even if the quality of what’s published and widely read declines?
My thought, frankly, is that we don’t do a good job of sortition of skills and aptitudes, because we think it’s “unfair,” so we’re approaching mass mediocrity instead of layers of elite performance, advanced performance, mediocre performance, and sub-par performance. (Or the upper layers happen at an extremely narrow band of society.)
We like to pretend that education sortition is happening by institution—that Harvard necessarily produces “elite” education and that Bumfuck Egypt State University is just passing people through.
But really we’re just sorting by class and letting the wealthy select which minorities or poor people their kids are going to have to mingle with along the way. They like black kids who are good athletes and poor kids who can make the institution look highly intelligent, while the mass of students are just in college to network and fuck with whatever their “natural” peer group is.
Eventually it’ll have to work itself out, and increasingly a lot of “education” is going to look more like apprenticeship for people in less “intellectual” fields and then the narrow band of really high academic performers will probably get sorted together for real. But I can’t predict how long that will take or what kind of social dynamics will need to happen to get us there. But handwringing over undergraduates reading complex sentences poorly is not going to be very determinative.
I mean, that and reinforcing class-marking social norms as they evolve.
For instance, at Harvard they probably have a few folks explaining how remoteness can be expressed without calling up themes of homophobia, anti-Arab sentiment and colonialism all in one tidy phrase, so that people who apparently haven’t got the news can feel properly shamed out of ‘polite’ society, while people who are wealthy enough to be above the law can emphasize their dominance by selectively ignoring these conventions as they develop.
So these institutions end up teaching habits of language that identify and separate us, preventing the non-billionaire classes from bonding, getting on the same page ideologically and building some political momentum.
I wondered the same thing about Dr. Zhivago. While no doubt a better written novel than the Hunger Games books, maybe the masses in the 60s would have preferred the Hunger Games had they been widely marketed, accessible, etc.
So much this. Being “fair” has eroded our standards to near nothing. I believe that children outside of the elite class should have access to equal education and opportunities, and that we need to crack down on the children of elites who do take away these opportunities unfairly (like the scandal with the fake athletics admissions a few years ago), but taking away the SATs isn’t helping anyone. I wish there was an easier way to fund programs that would elevate less privileged children and teens to be able to reach their full potential.
My college admitted a certain number of students with poor grades, low SAT scores or both and had a more intensive program to help them get up to speed. It was part of the school's mission. They also have scholarships to attract students with high SAT scores to goose the US News ratings.
>Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers.
Well, I am not sure. I think there are some young people who may not want debt from crushing student loans. Why don't young people want to study the humanities? Not because they are lazy and don't know how to read, but perhaps more importantly because these degrees are not valued in the job market. That's just one of my reactions to this article.
And humanities students used to be more valued in the job market! Besides moving on to degrees such as law, humanities students used to be welcomed in many white collar positions like marketing and pr and so forth. I’m sure many saw the recent article on philosophy majors in AI.
But in our anti-intellectual time, there are fewer and fewer senior people who come from the humanities and the lack of vision for hiring from there seems to be snowballing. Once you went to college to develop a broad understanding of the world and your position. Now college is closer to the new trade school with the expected exclusionary behavior on the side of those who approached it as specialist training for their field rather than a holistic education for leadership.
I don't know how true it is that undergrad humanity degrees are less valued on the job market, tbh. Computer science currently has one of the highest by-degree unemployment rates for new grads, and employment options for undergrads in some other STEM fields like biology and chemistry have long been rough, as those fields require advanced degrees for anything above entry level positions.
Fair enough, you have a good point. Maybe it is a bigger problem rather than the choice of major. But I think for humanities majors, they would also have to go into law, business, or another field to find good-paying employment, imo. I think you are right that comp sci, and other STEM fields are not any sort of guarantee to find good-paying work, either. To say nothing of the student debt needed by most people to afford their studies.
There's a lot going on here. Overall as a person who enjoys reading for fun and does a lot of reading professionally, this is pretty depressing. As a parent, I feel like I am trying to do my bit with the younger generation, but I could be doing more. As a getting to middle aged person, reading "I entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released" made me feel old. Anyway...
That said, things I am not worried about: adults reading YA or romantasy. If they're reading for enjoyment, that's positive, I hope they're having a good time. Nor am I that worried about kids going into kindergarten not knowing "nursery rhymes or fairy tales" because I don't think those specific pieces of culture are universal or need to be. I think throwing those 2 in there is not helpful to the overall argument. Also, the shots at digital reading and audiobooks... if I'm reading The Atlantic online, I may be going a little more surface, but again, at least I'm reading.
I think this article conflates three different ideas which are related but not the same thing. These are
if people can read
if people are reading for pleasure
if people are reading 'good' books for pleasure.
For me the last issue is a non-issue. There has always been trash published and it either becomes respectable and we forget it was considered trash, or it gets forgotten.
With reading for pleasure, I love it. It has been my most consistent hobby and gives me so much joy. But it is not for everyone, and when there are now so many other forms of entertainment then it's not a shock that less people are reading as they chose other things to do, like play video games or listen to podcasts.
I think literacy is the only real issue, and that isn't something that can be solved by individuals, it requires wholesale change but also a lot of political will. Because isn't there quality control or standards in US schools and universities? How can people graduate if they can't read? Is there no independent government bodies checking on these things?
And when all the signs point to screens in schools being terrible except when they help accessibility, why are so many schools still so enamoured with it? Is it just because someone is making a profit off them?
By lumping reading for pleasure or the quality of the work in with the fact that education standards are declining and no one seems to be checking it or stopping it, it makes it seem like it's an inevitable, unsolvable task. And to me that just give up attitude will mean that people do just stop bothering.
There is not really quality control or standards in the US education system. Standardized tests are as close at it gets, and that's all kind of flawed. Hell, homeschooling is basically unregulated in the US. With enough money/privilege , even a kid who is functionally illiterate can attend an ivy league university.
The theory of the Library of Alexandria dying due to apathy and not disaster is one I hadn't heard before. Honestly, article was worth a read just for that theory
It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the author of this article has read “A Clockwork Orange”— it’s rather famously written in a fictional, slang-based dialect rather than standard English, so the idea that young readers of today abandon it for being “written in old English” is pretty funny, but not perhaps the best illustration of the particular point they were trying to make…
It’s a lot of “maybe” and “what if?” interspersed with the hilariously brief snippets from a wide smattering of experts. A thin but broad exercise in handwringing. I wouldn’t say she’s entirely wrong, but we live at the apex of technical achievement and material abundance at a scale unimaginable to our forebears; a little techno-optimism wouldn’t hurt. Viewed as a literacy project in and of itself. LLMs are plainly the greatest creation we have yet wrought: they are literally thinking machines built from the very words that humans have spent millennia wrestling from their minds into existence. I think it’s rather inspiring when viewed in that light.
odjobz | 5 hours ago
TLDR
ManateeNipples | 5 hours ago
Lmao
JohnSith | 2 hours ago
Thanks for my first laugh today.
espressocycle | 4 hours ago
While much of this is relevant and troubling, the Bleak House example is a bit of a fallacy. The illiterate masses loved Dickens read aloud and no doubt understood his prose because his references were familiar to them. Modern readers find him difficult not because his writing is particularly dense but because he's writing in a language they do not speak. I would also question how much anyone ever understood Dickens, whose writing was verbose even then, as he was often paid by the word.
jvt_bi | 3 hours ago
So much this! I hated Shakespeare as a student until my teacher actually had us *watch* his work performed. With the acting and the words, intent became much clearer - I still didn’t understand all the references but at least I knew what was supposed to be funny!
With Dickens, I really loved his books as a teen because my mom showed me movies based on his work. It was easier to follow the language better when I knew the plot more. The language was a barrier to understanding but not enjoyment once I saw it as intended!
metadatame | 3 hours ago
I never found Dickens tough, but did struggle with Shakespeare.
readskiesdawn | 3 hours ago
The language drift is more obvious with Shakespeare, but it's still very much there for Dickens, Austen and Shelly. Technically speaking they're all in modern English, but some words have changed over time and others have fallen out of use.
And in Jane Austen's case the pop culture references she liked to make have fallen out of memory.
metadatame | 3 hours ago
Yeah - I think I just grew up in South Africa where Dickens was still cannon (along with the others mentioned, but also people like Hardy)
The register felt approachable. My English teacher read the opening chapter of great expectations in the original and abridged versions solely to deride the latter.
readskiesdawn | 2 hours ago
I read Dickens in school in the US, but my teacher would make vocabulary lessons out of it and used it as a jumping off point for the idea of language drift before we read Shakespeare.
metadatame | 2 hours ago
Well that seems at least aware. We were just thrown into Shakespeare.
My English teacher in contrast was far too fond of a drink and so never actually taught us anything, but was an exceptional narrator.
jvt_bi | 2 hours ago
I remember one of my English teachers telling us that using the “new English” translations provided in our Macbeth book next to the original text was cheating! 😂 and they wonder why kids don’t find learning Shakespeare enjoyable.
readskiesdawn | 2 hours ago
I mean, you do lose things in those versions, like how people in upper classes speak in iambic pentameter while poor characters speak in prose. Part of the study of Shakespeare is studying the poetry of it all and you do lose that when it's put into modern English.
My school's required versions had the original version on one side and the "modern translation" on the other. Although my teacher said she would prefer we only use the modern version if we got stuck.
Lindsaydoodles | 50 minutes ago
I read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school and enjoyed them well enough, but I love watching Shakespeare performed. I have a running list of every play I've seen and am hoping to see them all before I die. It's completely watching it (great fun) to reading it (incomprehensible).
ConfidenceNo1937 | 3 hours ago
Dickens was not paid by the word. That’s a myth.
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/rare-book-mythbusters-1
starshine1988 | 3 hours ago
That link says he was paid by installment… which seems being paid by the word but with more steps? Like the point is that the man wrote in a very wordy style, and he probably wouldn’t have been so verbose if he got paid a flat fee per story.
ConfidenceNo1937 | 3 hours ago
Not really. He dragged out his stories in terms of plot, yes, but in terms of his prose the verbosity isn’t all that different from many writers of the early Victorian era. It’s like dragging out episodes of a serialized TV show—the show doesn’t get wordier, but the plot spins in place (e.g. *Lost*).
If Dickens was much more verbose than his contemporaries, he likely wouldn’t have become very popular, in the same way an author today who is much wordier than his or her contemporaries wouldn’t be a great success—people would get bored. So instead, he got audiences hooked using plot convolutions.
espressocycle | 2 hours ago
You're probably right. The crazy plot extensions were the serial TV series of their day. He was also very funny, sometimes in ways that we don't notice today. Like all the ridiculous names he gave the characters.
Easy-Concentrate2636 | 2 hours ago
Actually, most nineteenth century writers were equally verbose. Balzac, James, Melville, Dostoyevsky - they are all wordy writers. One of the largest innovations of early twentieth century writers is writing in a sparser way that conveyed the bleakness of their times.
ConfidenceNo1937 | 2 hours ago
Precisely. People buy into the whole “Dickens was paid by the word” thing because they haven’t read very many nineteenth-century authors.
etherealsmog | 4 hours ago
I don’t love this kind of doomsday journalism.
I think the underlying “problem” is that we have broadened the availability of “advanced” education to so many people that the standards have declined. I think it’s an open question whether that’s a net positive. It’s certainly more egalitarian, however.
I’m sure Dr. Zhivago being the best-selling novel of the year back in the 1960s or whenever was a sign that most novels were being bought and read by a narrower subset of the population, for example. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it good or bad that a wider swathe of the population can read adequately even if the quality of what’s published and widely read declines?
My thought, frankly, is that we don’t do a good job of sortition of skills and aptitudes, because we think it’s “unfair,” so we’re approaching mass mediocrity instead of layers of elite performance, advanced performance, mediocre performance, and sub-par performance. (Or the upper layers happen at an extremely narrow band of society.)
We like to pretend that education sortition is happening by institution—that Harvard necessarily produces “elite” education and that Bumfuck Egypt State University is just passing people through.
But really we’re just sorting by class and letting the wealthy select which minorities or poor people their kids are going to have to mingle with along the way. They like black kids who are good athletes and poor kids who can make the institution look highly intelligent, while the mass of students are just in college to network and fuck with whatever their “natural” peer group is.
Eventually it’ll have to work itself out, and increasingly a lot of “education” is going to look more like apprenticeship for people in less “intellectual” fields and then the narrow band of really high academic performers will probably get sorted together for real. But I can’t predict how long that will take or what kind of social dynamics will need to happen to get us there. But handwringing over undergraduates reading complex sentences poorly is not going to be very determinative.
Fumquat | 2 hours ago
> But really we’re just sorting by class
I mean, that and reinforcing class-marking social norms as they evolve.
For instance, at Harvard they probably have a few folks explaining how remoteness can be expressed without calling up themes of homophobia, anti-Arab sentiment and colonialism all in one tidy phrase, so that people who apparently haven’t got the news can feel properly shamed out of ‘polite’ society, while people who are wealthy enough to be above the law can emphasize their dominance by selectively ignoring these conventions as they develop.
So these institutions end up teaching habits of language that identify and separate us, preventing the non-billionaire classes from bonding, getting on the same page ideologically and building some political momentum.
Equivalent-Piano147 | 2 hours ago
I wondered the same thing about Dr. Zhivago. While no doubt a better written novel than the Hunger Games books, maybe the masses in the 60s would have preferred the Hunger Games had they been widely marketed, accessible, etc.
espressocycle | 2 hours ago
For what it's worth I've seen a lot of old copies of Dr Zhivago in mint condition. Just because people bought the book doesn't mean they read it.
etherealsmog | an hour ago
I found myself wondering if “best selling” meant “libraries bought a bunch of copies that sat on shelves unread” lol.
justalittlestupid | 3 hours ago
So much this. Being “fair” has eroded our standards to near nothing. I believe that children outside of the elite class should have access to equal education and opportunities, and that we need to crack down on the children of elites who do take away these opportunities unfairly (like the scandal with the fake athletics admissions a few years ago), but taking away the SATs isn’t helping anyone. I wish there was an easier way to fund programs that would elevate less privileged children and teens to be able to reach their full potential.
espressocycle | 2 hours ago
My college admitted a certain number of students with poor grades, low SAT scores or both and had a more intensive program to help them get up to speed. It was part of the school's mission. They also have scholarships to attract students with high SAT scores to goose the US News ratings.
justalittlestupid | 2 hours ago
Sounds super interesting!
GreenEyedTreeHugger | 4 hours ago
Dr. Zhivago is such a good read! Movie good too.
Think_Clothes8126 | 4 hours ago
>Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers.
Well, I am not sure. I think there are some young people who may not want debt from crushing student loans. Why don't young people want to study the humanities? Not because they are lazy and don't know how to read, but perhaps more importantly because these degrees are not valued in the job market. That's just one of my reactions to this article.
councilmember | 3 hours ago
And humanities students used to be more valued in the job market! Besides moving on to degrees such as law, humanities students used to be welcomed in many white collar positions like marketing and pr and so forth. I’m sure many saw the recent article on philosophy majors in AI.
But in our anti-intellectual time, there are fewer and fewer senior people who come from the humanities and the lack of vision for hiring from there seems to be snowballing. Once you went to college to develop a broad understanding of the world and your position. Now college is closer to the new trade school with the expected exclusionary behavior on the side of those who approached it as specialist training for their field rather than a holistic education for leadership.
skyewardeyes | 3 hours ago
I don't know how true it is that undergrad humanity degrees are less valued on the job market, tbh. Computer science currently has one of the highest by-degree unemployment rates for new grads, and employment options for undergrads in some other STEM fields like biology and chemistry have long been rough, as those fields require advanced degrees for anything above entry level positions.
Think_Clothes8126 | 2 hours ago
Fair enough, you have a good point. Maybe it is a bigger problem rather than the choice of major. But I think for humanities majors, they would also have to go into law, business, or another field to find good-paying employment, imo. I think you are right that comp sci, and other STEM fields are not any sort of guarantee to find good-paying work, either. To say nothing of the student debt needed by most people to afford their studies.
Icy-Gap4673 | 3 hours ago
There's a lot going on here. Overall as a person who enjoys reading for fun and does a lot of reading professionally, this is pretty depressing. As a parent, I feel like I am trying to do my bit with the younger generation, but I could be doing more. As a getting to middle aged person, reading "I entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released" made me feel old. Anyway...
That said, things I am not worried about: adults reading YA or romantasy. If they're reading for enjoyment, that's positive, I hope they're having a good time. Nor am I that worried about kids going into kindergarten not knowing "nursery rhymes or fairy tales" because I don't think those specific pieces of culture are universal or need to be. I think throwing those 2 in there is not helpful to the overall argument. Also, the shots at digital reading and audiobooks... if I'm reading The Atlantic online, I may be going a little more surface, but again, at least I'm reading.
CheerilyTerrified | 3 hours ago
I think this article conflates three different ideas which are related but not the same thing. These are
For me the last issue is a non-issue. There has always been trash published and it either becomes respectable and we forget it was considered trash, or it gets forgotten.
With reading for pleasure, I love it. It has been my most consistent hobby and gives me so much joy. But it is not for everyone, and when there are now so many other forms of entertainment then it's not a shock that less people are reading as they chose other things to do, like play video games or listen to podcasts.
I think literacy is the only real issue, and that isn't something that can be solved by individuals, it requires wholesale change but also a lot of political will. Because isn't there quality control or standards in US schools and universities? How can people graduate if they can't read? Is there no independent government bodies checking on these things?
And when all the signs point to screens in schools being terrible except when they help accessibility, why are so many schools still so enamoured with it? Is it just because someone is making a profit off them?
By lumping reading for pleasure or the quality of the work in with the fact that education standards are declining and no one seems to be checking it or stopping it, it makes it seem like it's an inevitable, unsolvable task. And to me that just give up attitude will mean that people do just stop bothering.
heathers-damage | 2 hours ago
There is not really quality control or standards in the US education system. Standardized tests are as close at it gets, and that's all kind of flawed. Hell, homeschooling is basically unregulated in the US. With enough money/privilege , even a kid who is functionally illiterate can attend an ivy league university.
Awkward_Tick0 | 5 hours ago
The irony
ErrantJune | 4 hours ago
The Atlantic strikes again.
Hokuboku | 2 hours ago
The theory of the Library of Alexandria dying due to apathy and not disaster is one I hadn't heard before. Honestly, article was worth a read just for that theory
TavieP | 26 minutes ago
It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the author of this article has read “A Clockwork Orange”— it’s rather famously written in a fictional, slang-based dialect rather than standard English, so the idea that young readers of today abandon it for being “written in old English” is pretty funny, but not perhaps the best illustration of the particular point they were trying to make…
americanidle | 4 hours ago
It’s a lot of “maybe” and “what if?” interspersed with the hilariously brief snippets from a wide smattering of experts. A thin but broad exercise in handwringing. I wouldn’t say she’s entirely wrong, but we live at the apex of technical achievement and material abundance at a scale unimaginable to our forebears; a little techno-optimism wouldn’t hurt. Viewed as a literacy project in and of itself. LLMs are plainly the greatest creation we have yet wrought: they are literally thinking machines built from the very words that humans have spent millennia wrestling from their minds into existence. I think it’s rather inspiring when viewed in that light.