Salads

In this post we'll consider essays, the non-fiction analog of short stories, which we sampled in the previous post.  But I want to first consider the issue, for me this is the crux of the matter, whether students make good meaning of what they read.  As was mentioned in the previous post, the difficulty of  the piece they are reading might matter as would the intended audience for the piece.  I want to focus on pieces meant for a general audience and at the difficulty level at or near that of a New York Times article, an Op-Ed piece, or a somewhat longer piece in the Sunday Magazine.   Nowadays, there are free online tools that measure reading difficulty, such as this one.  I used it on Gail Collins' latest column called, Trump's Dreaded Nickname.  The results are below.  

The results suggest that college students should be able to make good meaning of Gail Collins humorous piece.  Yet my experience in teaching over the years, dating back at least to the mid to late 1990s, when the New York Times first appeared online, is that there would always be a handful of students who had this ability, but a majority of my class would not.  I developed this impression from some Q&A done in the live class session, not by formal testing.  Believing that my conclusions were typical of instructors, at least of college students who study economics, one wonders why it is true.  I got some insight on this four or five years ago from a student who was brutally honest with me, much more so than I'd have been were I in her shoes.  This was in regard to a piece I wrote that was posted on the course Web site.  She reported that she had skimmed it, but hadn't read it carefully.  Skimming works can be a rational response to information overload.  I'll give her that.  But if it precludes reading anything slowly and deeply, then a second reason emerges for not being able to make good meaning of a piece of reading.  The student, lacking practice in doing that, doesn't have the requisite skill.  I fear that far too many college students don't read anything meant for a general audience in a slow and deliberate manner.

For students in the non-course, the skimming argument should be irrelevant, as the students need to be time abundant to participate. With that as precondition, my motive for offering the non-course is to see whether students can get that requisite practice in reading, and reflecting, and learning in the process.  Part of that experiment is finding reading materials that might resonate with the student to encourage such practice.  On this, I confess that I'm out of my element.  I don't have the mindset of a current college student.  So I'm making a rather large assumption, suggesting works that appealed to me in the hope that they'll also appeal to current students as well.  Another part of the experiment is giving feedback, once the students do write about their reflections, with that type of coaching keeping the students engaged in the reading activity.  On this I'm somewhat more confident, as I've done this sort of thing in my economics teaching where each student would write a weekly blog post  and the majority of students expressed that they valued the feedback a lot. But, in the economics course the students wrote to a prompt I provided to them ahead of time.  What if students were to read something that I hadn't read and write reflections on that?  Would my comments on those reflections then only be worth a hill of beans?  I don't know.  

There is still another issue to confront.  What makes a piece truly for the general interest or, alternatively, what makes the piece more specialized for a specific interest?  Put a different way, what is the reader expected to already know before reading the piece?  If most readers don't know what the author expects them to know, then the author will have failed in writing the piece for the general interest, unless the author produces a version of the piece that includes all the necessary background information to get the readers caught up.  Part of general education is giving the student background information of this sort, so the reader already is conversant with it or can do a quick research to become conversant with it. But across generations and across cultures, there surely will be disagreement as to what constitutes the right type of general education.  I only want to note here that in making good meaning of a non-fiction piece, the reader needs to understand the context in which the author is writing.  Getting that understanding may require reading other things than just the piece in question.  

Apart from making good meaning of a piece, there are several reasons why a reader would find reading the piece a difficult thing to do, even if it is a small step (as compared to a book length work).  Here are some possible reasons the reader might find it difficult to do, though I'm sure this is an incomplete list.  

• The reader has no interest in the subject matter that the piece deals with. To avoid the retort that the reader is closed minded, let me posit that all of us limit our interests somewhat and it is okay to do that.  For example, the last video game I can recall playing was in 1999.  A piece about current video games would be of no interest to me. 
• The piece is meant to be persuasive.  The style of the author is much akin to the style of a salesman.  The reader is offended by being sold something where ahead of time the reader expressed no interest in buying. An alternative that is more readable is to make the argument the author wants to make but also make the counterargument and let the reader chose from among them.  The reader should find that more balanced approach less offensive.
• There are errors in the piece - logical, evidentiary, spelling and grammar, etc.  The reader feels that she could have written a better version of the piece than the author did.  I want to note here that I'm referring to a piece written by a so-called expert.  As an instructor reading student writing, I expect errors of this sort.  We all learn by making mistakes.  Part of my task as instructor is to encourage the student author from not making the same mistake a second time.
• Somebody who is close to the reader suggested that the reader have a go at the piece.  The reader has issues with that somebody and that clouds the view the reader has of the piece. 

Some of these situations can be avoided, at least to some degree.  If the reader is open to trying new things as far as what to read, the reader may find after the fact that the subject matter was not interesting.  That will prevent trying other pieces on the same subject, but not the first one.  Sometimes it only takes a paragraph or two to feel that a piece is a sales job.  Putting the piece down after that can make sense and then is not indicative that the reader lacks follow through.  Pieces in well regarded publications have been reviewed by others and might very well have been copy edited.  So the error risk is far less.  I'll leave the managing of close relationships and reading to somebody else who can speak to it more intelligently than I can.  Here, I'm just acknowledging that it can matter. 

Let me close this discussion part of the post with the observation that I read fiction and non-fiction quite differently.  I don't know if that is true for others, but I think it worth describing how these types of reading differ for me.  With fiction, after I've gotten into the story, which unfortunately takes longer now than it used to, I'm completely absorbed in it and my mind has tuned out everything else that is going on.  With non-fiction, however, I have an argument with what I'm reading.  Really, it's an imagined argument with the author of the piece.  I certainly did this for reading economics papers submitted for review at a journal, where I was one of the referees of the paper.  Then it is very much like reading and reflection interspersed, rather than the reading coming first.  I might pause in the reading and develop an alternative model, or look for an alternative way to exposit the model that the author put forward.  If I thought that overall there was something I was learning from reading the paper, then my goal was to improve the paper and tell the editor to encourage a revise and resubmit.  If I thought the point the author was making was trivial, I'd content myself with one way to illustrate that to the editor.  I find that I read other non-fiction pieces somewhat in this manner, even when I'm simply a reader, not a referee.  After I've done that I will often write a post in my blog Lanny on Learning, to externalize my formative thinking.  In that sense, I do practice what I preach.

I hope that the recommendations which follow get over these hurdles and the non-course readers (and others too) find them engaging.  

Readable General Interest Pieces:

Writers on Writing from the New York Times
This is a collection of essays from a series the Times ran more than 20 years ago, featuring some of the best known writers of the time.  Each author writes about some issue with writing that the author found was of central importance.  Many are authors of well-known novels.  While the entire series is excellent, I want to specifically mention two of the pieces.  The one by E.L. Doctorow considers the effects that movies and TV had on the novel.  He bemoans this as a matter of style, but recognizes that more contemporary novels have less description and are less wordy.  Reading older fiction may be a way for students in the non-course to slow down the world and get their minds more engaged in a single thing. The other piece is by Saul Bellow, who talks fondly of his relationship to readers, those that give his works serious reading.  Conversely, he is not interested in the reader who might open the book, but soon put it down, never to pick it up again.  Bellow feels a debt to serious readers, but not such obligation to these other readers, even if they buy his book.   This makes the mindset of an author in the mold of Bellow different from the mindset of a profit maximizer, who would want the largest audience possible.  Book publishers are more in that second category, as are movie producers.  For an author with a well established reputation, there is no problem.  But for an author writing the first novel, it's a real challenge to get recognition. 

The Overprotected Kid by Hanna Rosin

There has been an argument floating about for the last five or ten years, maybe a bit longer, that current college students are fragile, since they didn't learn to take the normal hard knocks of life during childhood.  A big reason for this is that they were mainly in activity supervised by adults, and only rarely in play with other kids with no adult present.  In turn, parents who are well meaning may have thought the adult supervision necessary, to make sure the kids were safe.  In the immediate term, that makes sense.  But in the longer term, the parents were smothering their children.  This piece makes the argument specifically in regard to playgrounds, but the theme of the piece can be readily extended to all sorts of other play kids (should have) engaged in.

In Front of Your Nose by George Orwell

Orwell was one of the most prescient thinkers and writers of the 20th century.  This essay is a rather harsh reminder that even thoughtful people have tendency to believe in things that taken together are self-contradictory - if one is true, the other can't be true.  So we must be constantly diligent to purge our beliefs of such inconsistencies and arrive at a worldview that is not evidently wrong from the get go.  The piece can be taken as a rather harsh commentary on our politics today. 

The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould

On one level, this is a fun baseball piece about Joe DiMaggio's famous 56 consecutive games hitting streak.  At a different level, it servers as a foundational piece for behavioral economics, although Gould himself was an evolutionary biologist.  The issue is the "hot hand" in sports.  Is it just like an optical illusion when it's really just that a very good player will have a hot streak now and then?  Or was the player really hot.  Can statisticians decide that for us in a way that will convince the rest of the population?  If you find this piece a good read, you might have a look at a blog post I wrote some time ago that makes mention of several other things to read which are connected to these ideas.  

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem

Students are taught a rather mechanical view of plagiarism - cite your sources when writing a paper - but it is delivered as more rules to follow, like not driving over the speed limit.  On a much more fundamental level one should ask, where do the ideas of a creative person come from?  Are they hatched out of nothingness? No, they aren't.  Invariably they come from what was before, then considered in a new way.  But if we've been thinking about something for quite a while before producing a work, do we recall when we first started and what was the catalyst for that?  In this fantastic essay Lethem takes us through several well known pieces where there are possible antecedents that are not as well known.  Perhaps that's the rule, not the exception. 

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a provocative piece about how the country might repair itself and own up to all the damages it has done because of Slavery, then Jim Crow, and then Separate but Equal.  There have been some more recent pieces on the same subject.  This one was written while President Obama was still in office and Black Lives Matter had only recently happened as a movement.   Since my mom was a survivor of the Holocaust, and ultimately received pensions from both Germany and Austria for denial of her education, I was probably more disposed than most readers to the arguments made here.  But if you asked seriously, how can we in America get past our own divisiveness, wouldn't something like this be part of the answer?

How Inequality Threatens Civil Society by Angus Deaton (If your university library has access to Scientific American, maybe you can view this for free.  Otherwise, I'm afraid, there's a charge for access.)

Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize winner in economics.  He and his wife Anne Case have done fundamental research on the social consequences of inequality in economic circumstance.  This piece is written for non-economists to give them an appreciation of all the pernicious consequences of inequality.  Having so many people live with a sense of hopelessness is terribly destructive.  This piece was published prior to the 2016 election.  The economy was in reasonably good shape and there was no pandemic.  Yet these issues existed, even then.  Sometimes, when the economy appears healthy, we tend to ignore the plight of those who are suffering.  Now that may be more evident, as we are all suffering to some degree.  Yet those who lack income suffer much more.  

The Lesson of Tal Afar by George Packer

This piece is from 2006 and is about the Iraq War.  It is one of the very few pieces I read at the time that suggested some optimism as to outcome, and explained the mechanism for achieving that, having tea with the locals and being respectful in those interactions.  Since the piece appeared in the New Yorker, it wasn't from a place that was cheerleading for the war.  It's interesting to read from that perspective.  

Longer and More Specialized Pieces:

Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities Boyer Commission Report

This report is from the late 1990s.  It is thoughtful on the following question/issue.  The lifeblood of research universities is research.  That's what professors focus on.  That's what administrators promote.  However, most undergraduates live outside of the research environment.  This is not true of graduate students in doctoral programs, who do become part of the research culture.  The question is, how can undergraduates become insiders in this environment rather than persist as outsiders?  I believe the reality is that little to no progress has been made about embracing the recommendations in the report.  However, the report does define the issue well and may still be quite relevant regarding what research universities should be doing. 

The Bonds of Nationality by Albion W. Small

I believe that Albion Small was the initial President of the American Sociological Society, so this paper reads partially like one aimed at academics.  It was published in 1915, before America had formally entered into World War I, and near the end of the Progressive Period in American history.  It is interesting with thinking of nationality, specifically for America, as a kind of religious feeling.  As the piece was written after a very large wave of immigration, mainly from Europe, where most of the immigrants were running away from threats in the Old Country, it is interesting to consider what they were running toward and how they each could feel part of the same whole in spite of strong differences in their origins.