Three Cheers for "Rooter!"
I am an unusually good reader. I have always been told that by teachers and by tests. I have noticed it myself. I will not mention the specific percentile at which I scored on the verbal section of the GRE, but I will note that it confirms that I am a good reader (even as my results on the math section make a compelling case that the two abilities are passed on through entirely different genes).
One evening during my freshman year in college, I was sitting in a dorm room reading a history textbook. History was, and is, a favorite subject; in fact, it was eventually my major. In high school, I often read history textbooks for pleasure. Why was it, I wondered, that I was having to work so hard to get through this material? The subject matter wasn't all that it was that difficult. In fact, I don't think there was much in that chapter that I didn't already know.
I'd noticed the phenomenon in high school, but usually only when reading Missouri Synod Lutheran theology books, whose authors- even when several generations removed from Germany- tended to use German sentence structure when writing in English (as well as to exhibit a disconcerting tendency to confuse English word "also" with the German word also).
But this was a textbook on American history. As far as I could tell, nobody with an umlaut in his name had been anywhere around when it was written. The names of the authors were solidly Anglo-Saxon. So what was going on?
Then, suddenly, it hit me: the problem was that people who wrote academic textbooks beyond the secondary level often knew a great deal about their subject matter, but tended to have great difficulty in communicating through written English.
They still exhibit that inability- and I think it may explain why I scored at such a high percentile on the verbal section of the GRE!
Throughout college and seminary, this insight continued to be confirmed by example after example. The subject matter was irrelevant. The folks who write textbooks at the grammar school and even high school level have to strive for a certain clarity of expression, but when it comes to books written for the college or graduate school levels, it's almost as if competence in any area of academic pursuit is incompatable with the basic ability to string together a reasonably coherent series of words.
It is with a certain amount of glee, therefore, that I note that three MIT students created a computer program designed to write "scholarly" papers consisting entirely of gibberish, complete with meaningless charts and graphs- and then had one of its products accepted for presentation at a scholarly conference!
One evening during my freshman year in college, I was sitting in a dorm room reading a history textbook. History was, and is, a favorite subject; in fact, it was eventually my major. In high school, I often read history textbooks for pleasure. Why was it, I wondered, that I was having to work so hard to get through this material? The subject matter wasn't all that it was that difficult. In fact, I don't think there was much in that chapter that I didn't already know.
I'd noticed the phenomenon in high school, but usually only when reading Missouri Synod Lutheran theology books, whose authors- even when several generations removed from Germany- tended to use German sentence structure when writing in English (as well as to exhibit a disconcerting tendency to confuse English word "also" with the German word also).
But this was a textbook on American history. As far as I could tell, nobody with an umlaut in his name had been anywhere around when it was written. The names of the authors were solidly Anglo-Saxon. So what was going on?
Then, suddenly, it hit me: the problem was that people who wrote academic textbooks beyond the secondary level often knew a great deal about their subject matter, but tended to have great difficulty in communicating through written English.
They still exhibit that inability- and I think it may explain why I scored at such a high percentile on the verbal section of the GRE!
Throughout college and seminary, this insight continued to be confirmed by example after example. The subject matter was irrelevant. The folks who write textbooks at the grammar school and even high school level have to strive for a certain clarity of expression, but when it comes to books written for the college or graduate school levels, it's almost as if competence in any area of academic pursuit is incompatable with the basic ability to string together a reasonably coherent series of words.
It is with a certain amount of glee, therefore, that I note that three MIT students created a computer program designed to write "scholarly" papers consisting entirely of gibberish, complete with meaningless charts and graphs- and then had one of its products accepted for presentation at a scholarly conference!
Comments