dumbing down

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Oct 16 08:24:47 PDT 2000


Michael Yates wrote:


> But doesn't Hemingway's prose test out at a pretty low grade level too?

If it does, then there is a flaw in the algorithm. It's been almost 50 years since I last read Hemingway, and over 50 years since I first read him, but I remember a response to that first reading (of *The Sun Also Rises*) during my senior year of highschool. The style (not the story) made me jumpy, and I was barely able to complete the novel. Now the source of that response, I think, was *nothing* in the individual sentences or in the vocabulary but in the relationships between sentences. So to get the 'grade level' of Hemingway you would need software that ignored both vocabulary and individual sentence structure and somehow or other measured the relationships among sentences that constitute the style's effect. (And response to which constitute's the style's ease or difficulty.)

Carrol

P.S. Criticisms of the educational system (in the sense of assigning to it the *cause* of any social phenomenon) are unavoidably grounded in an individualistic metaphysic.



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