This should probably be its own essay at some point, but here’s the short and sloppy version:
Against these objections is the material in the essay itself. Close reading is hard.
I think this line touches on something which is important to understand. My college required me to take an English class, and I took it online last summer. This gave me the opportunity to read almost every essay and scrap of writing produced by the thirty-odd people of the class in the context of writing their thoughts in response to essays about better writing, a lovely bit of recursion which I found enlightening. I think I have a better model now of how slightly-above-average (if they were worse they wouldn’t be in college, if they were better they’d have skipped the class) people engage with the written word.
The teacher linked an essay begging new college students not to worry about the pointless things high schoolers are graded on, and instead focus on writing compellingly—those pointless things were enumerated, by way of example. This essay was quite scathing, strident! Several students replied by saying that while they’d forgotten those pointless rules they were glad for the reminder—expressed concern that they hadn’t conformed to the rules in their introductory essays, and vowed to obey them in the future.
This wasn’t an isolated occurrence; there were always people who read something and got exactly the opposite of the author’s point. Those who didn’t got a point utterly removed, that I’d have to dig through the essay to see what line they’d misread if I wanted to understand them. People who got from the essay what the instructor hoped the class would were maybe a tenth of the total (myself not among them; I learned a lot in that class, but nothing the teacher had set out to teach).
When asked to choose which of three works expressed a particular point best—there was a personal essay, an analytic essay, and an inane video—the class overwhelmingly preferred the video. Detailing why, they said that they could hear inflection and tone in the video, that they didn’t have to struggle with individual words and lose their place in the sentence, that they didn’t have to reread things to understand what was being said.
My conclusion is that if something is expressed only in writing it cannot reach the absolute majority of the population, any more than a particularly well-written verse in French can permeate the Anglosphere. I think that in many cases where highly literate people think they’ve identified an important problem, they’ve instead failed to diagnose illiteracy. (I watched the course instructor struggle with that; they didn’t seem any more able to understand that the class couldn’t understand them than the class was able to understand them. They were always engaging with them on a level which implied they didn’t realize the vast gulf of inferential distance.)
Fascinating! I would appreciate an essay arguing for this rather strong claim
My conclusion is that if something is expressed only in writing it cannot reach the absolute majority of the population, any more than a particularly well-written verse in French can permeate the Anglosphere.
I have read weaker versions of how hard successful communication is, such as Double Illusion of Transparency and You Have About Five Words – but I think that your example is even stronger than this and an interesting addition.
Personally, I think I also belong to the group of 2nd-order-illiterate people in that I need to push my concentration a lot in order to read with sufficient care. My default way of reading is nowhere near enough and I need to read a text several times until I feel that it doesn’t contain ‘new thoughts’ even if it is well-written. I do profit a lot from podcasts and lectures, even if it is just by ‘watching a person think about the topic’ and the content is the same as in a text book.
This should probably be its own essay at some point, but here’s the short and sloppy version:
I think this line touches on something which is important to understand. My college required me to take an English class, and I took it online last summer. This gave me the opportunity to read almost every essay and scrap of writing produced by the thirty-odd people of the class in the context of writing their thoughts in response to essays about better writing, a lovely bit of recursion which I found enlightening. I think I have a better model now of how slightly-above-average (if they were worse they wouldn’t be in college, if they were better they’d have skipped the class) people engage with the written word.
The teacher linked an essay begging new college students not to worry about the pointless things high schoolers are graded on, and instead focus on writing compellingly—those pointless things were enumerated, by way of example. This essay was quite scathing, strident! Several students replied by saying that while they’d forgotten those pointless rules they were glad for the reminder—expressed concern that they hadn’t conformed to the rules in their introductory essays, and vowed to obey them in the future.
This wasn’t an isolated occurrence; there were always people who read something and got exactly the opposite of the author’s point. Those who didn’t got a point utterly removed, that I’d have to dig through the essay to see what line they’d misread if I wanted to understand them. People who got from the essay what the instructor hoped the class would were maybe a tenth of the total (myself not among them; I learned a lot in that class, but nothing the teacher had set out to teach).
When asked to choose which of three works expressed a particular point best—there was a personal essay, an analytic essay, and an inane video—the class overwhelmingly preferred the video. Detailing why, they said that they could hear inflection and tone in the video, that they didn’t have to struggle with individual words and lose their place in the sentence, that they didn’t have to reread things to understand what was being said.
My conclusion is that if something is expressed only in writing it cannot reach the absolute majority of the population, any more than a particularly well-written verse in French can permeate the Anglosphere. I think that in many cases where highly literate people think they’ve identified an important problem, they’ve instead failed to diagnose illiteracy. (I watched the course instructor struggle with that; they didn’t seem any more able to understand that the class couldn’t understand them than the class was able to understand them. They were always engaging with them on a level which implied they didn’t realize the vast gulf of inferential distance.)
Fascinating! I would appreciate an essay arguing for this rather strong claim
I have read weaker versions of how hard successful communication is, such as Double Illusion of Transparency and You Have About Five Words – but I think that your example is even stronger than this and an interesting addition.
Personally, I think I also belong to the group of 2nd-order-illiterate people in that I need to push my concentration a lot in order to read with sufficient care. My default way of reading is nowhere near enough and I need to read a text several times until I feel that it doesn’t contain ‘new thoughts’ even if it is well-written. I do profit a lot from podcasts and lectures, even if it is just by ‘watching a person think about the topic’ and the content is the same as in a text book.