"Is the decline of writing making journalism dumber?"
« previous post | next post »
No. At least, there've been plenty of dumb articles over past decades and centuries, and plenty of smart ones recently. But I have some complaints about one particular recent article in The Economist, "Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, scholars fear", 9/4/2025.
I should start by saying that the quality of articles in The Economist is generally very high, in my opinion, and its articles about language are especially good. So why was I disappointed in this one?
Here are its first two paragraphs:
The experiment was simple; so too, you may have thought, was the task. Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In other words: some students reading English literature were asked to read some English literature from the mid-19th century. How hard could it be?
Very, it turns out. The students were flummoxed by legal language and baffled by metaphor. A Dickensian description of fog left them totally fogged. They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?” The problem was less that these students of literature were not literary and more that they were barely even literate.
My first complaint: there's no link to the referenced experiment. We're not even given the title of the publication documenting it, or the names of its authors.
Here's why that matters. Internet search reveals what the publication was: Susan Carlson et al., "They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities", CEA Critic 2024. And checking that publication reveals several relevant facts:
- Although the study was published in March 2024, the study was done in January to April of 2015, more than 10 years ago.
- The 85 subjects in the study came from two Kansas regional universities.
- Their average ACT Reading score was 22.4, which is "low intermediate level",
- The authors divided the subjects' Bleak House explanations into three categories: problematic, competent, and proficient.
- Their discussion focused on the students in the "problematic" category: 49 of 85.
In other words, they discuss the worst students in a sample with low scores to start with.
Why did they do that? As they explain,
The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages”. In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.
So the study was designed to test the university and its faculty, not the students. The conclusion, basically, is that these students entered the university incapable of reading canonical literature; the university and its faculty failed to fix the problem; and the students didn't fix the problem on their own.
I'm not convinced that being able to read and understand the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House is an appropriate measure for the reading ability of modern American youth. That novel's many words and phrases from the 19th-century British court system make it hard for a modern American reader to grasp the context. I'd be more impressed if the students failed to understand the start of Great Expectations, Emma, Gulliver's Travels, Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or etc.
But let's grant that Carlson et al. have proved their point, and just note that The Economist's writer badly mis-read (or maybe mis-represented?) their work, by presenting it as evidence that today's university-level literature students can't read Dickens.
My second complaint is that The Economist's writer goes on to use the Flesch-Kincaid readability measure:
We also analysed almost 250 years of inaugural presidential addresses using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. George Washington’s scored 28.7, denoting postgraduate level, while Donald Trump’s came in at 9.4, the reading level of a high-schooler.
See my 2015 post "More Flesch-Kincaid grade-level nonsense", which points out that different choices of punctuation strongly modulate the Flesch-Kincaid index, as in this example from one of Donald Trump's speeches, which was used in a stupid newspaper article to prove that Trump operates at a 4th grade level:
It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America. And it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 4.4]
It’s coming from more than Mexico, it’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know, because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 8.5]
It’s coming from more than Mexico, it’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East; but we don’t know, because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast. [Grade level 12.5]
That post closes this way:
It's uncharitable and unfair of me to imply that the author of the Globe piece might be "stupid". But at some point, journalists should look behind the label to see what a metric like "the Flesch-Kincaid score" really is, and ask themselves whether invoking it is adding anything to their analysis except for a false facade of scientism.
That's enough complaining for now. But since The Economist's article also frets about secular changes in sentence length, let me refer interested readers to the slides for my talk at the 2022 SHEL ("Studies on the History of the English Language") conference.
Rodger C said,
September 6, 2025 @ 9:32 am
If I heard of students who didn't recognize fog, my first question would be, where in the southwest US was this experiment conducted?
FM said,
September 6, 2025 @ 9:52 am
Amusingly, the article botches the description of the example in the study:
one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?”
There were two men in the sentence and the student thought one of them, "a large advocate with great whiskers", was an animal. I'm not sure how to state that as concisely though.
Mark Liberman said,
September 6, 2025 @ 10:11 am
@Roger C "If I heard of students who didn't recognize fog, my first question would be, where in the southwest US was this experiment conducted?":
That's another aspect of Carlson et al. that the Economist article totally misrepresents, at least by implication. The subjects all knew perfectly what fog is — but one of them interprets
Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
as
There's just fog everywhere.
Carlson et al. comment:
By reducing all these details in the passage to vague, generic language, the subject does not read closely enough to follow the fog as it moves throughout the shipyards. And, as she continues to skip over almost all the concrete details in the following sentences, she never recognizes that this literal fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion, disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery.
Mark Liberman said,
September 6, 2025 @ 10:19 am
@FM "There were two men in the sentence and the student thought one of them, "a large advocate with great whiskers", was an animal. I'm not sure how to state that as concisely though."
The Economist's statement is not very concise:
They could not grasp basic vocabulary: one student thought that when a man was said to have “whiskers” it meant he was “in a room with an animal I think…A cat?”
This implies that the student thought that only cats have whiskers, which is a false and misleading presentation of what actually happened.
David Marjanović said,
September 6, 2025 @ 11:41 am
Whiskers is hardly basic vocabulary, and I'm sure not knowing the word was once able to refer to any old mustache instead of specifically to vibrissae is widespread.
It doesn't move. The flowing and rolling is a metaphor.
And what is an ait?
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 6, 2025 @ 11:53 am
As a college graduate who majored in English and has worked as a reporter and editor at establishments nowhere near as prestigious as the Economist, I am disappointed in their article because it reflects a flawed approach. That is, it focuses on fiction — and not just random fiction, but fiction written by an author who is part of the canon. I prefer to avoid reading Dickens, even if he has been canonized.
If someone wants to get my attention by writing about how kids today can’t read, they need to be testing their readers with texts such as warranties, terms of service, employee handbooks, instruction manuals, recipes, the back of seed packets, vehicle owners’ manuals, mortgage and other financial documents, zoning laws, and other prose that is common to everyday life. In my experience, nonfiction gets short shrift in K-12 education in the U.S. Literature is a vast and rich pleasure and worthy of study. But I grew up reading a lot of nonfiction — mostly in magazines — and later in newspapers. It sounds like the students from Kansas never had that stimulation.
Philip Taylor said,
September 6, 2025 @ 2:24 pm
David —
Philip Taylor said,
September 6, 2025 @ 2:31 pm
Oh, and —
DJL said,
September 6, 2025 @ 2:32 pm
Ah, The Economist: confusing ideology for analysis since 1843.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 6, 2025 @ 3:11 pm
I think "advocate" as a synonym for lawyer is pardonably obscure for today's American college students even if a reading of the passage in question ought to have at least led the reader to suspect that the "large advocate" was a human being of some sort. Although Bleak House has much more lexical obscurity to offer, such as "suitor" in the sense "someone pursuing a lawsuit" rather than "someone pursuing a potential spouse." And if you don't happen to know the exotic anthropological fact that then as now the ceremonial wearing of wigs was a feature of the English legal profession there is much else that would make no sense.
There's obviously a larger point here which is how much "reading comprehension" is about knowing words and parsing syntax and how much it's about understanding background contexts other than those of ones own immediate life experience.
John said,
September 6, 2025 @ 3:17 pm
Someone at The Economist was clearly very impressed by that study, which was also mentioned in an article there in June: "Why today’s graduates are screwed" (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/06/16/why-todays-graduates-are-screwed).
(I confess that I happen to remember the previous reference because I was reading Bleak House when that issue arrived and was pleased to be favorably compared to English majors.)
Pamela said,
September 6, 2025 @ 9:06 pm
I really appreciate the author's method of looking into the real sources of the breezy summaries we are often offered by the press. I can see that attempts to quantify the exact degree of degeneration of literacy are all fatuous in their ways, but anybody who teaches (or reads, or listens) can't help being struck by the fact that literacy, and genuine expression, are simply declining among English speakers (and maybe for all languages). It is bad, and editors now feel constrained to keep writers to a severely limited vocabulary, which only makes it worse. I have a particular concern with the relationship between declining grasp of grammar and vocabulary, on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other. But there are plenty of other reasons to want writers, poets, scholars, or anybody at all to sustain a sense of exploration, expansion, precision, and power in their language use. Things are very much going the opposite way.
AntC said,
September 6, 2025 @ 10:14 pm
@DavidM (and thank you PhilipT) Thames Aits/Eyots, and still very much known by those names.
GH said,
September 7, 2025 @ 12:59 am
@ J.W. Brewer:
"Advocate" also has "cat" as a substring, which may subconsciously have influenced the student. I wonder how they pronounced it…
@Barbara Phillips Long:
I don't see how your reading preference shows the study to be flawed. The study focused on fiction because it was investigating whether the training the students, as English majors, received in analysis of literary narratives enabled them to independently grasp the meaning of a supposedly representative text:
Mark Liberman's point that these are not particularly high-scoring students in the first place is fair, but the authors also mention that "All except three self-reported “A’s” and “B’s” in their English courses."
David Marjanović said,
September 7, 2025 @ 4:39 am
Thanks for the aits!
Amazing. I've never seen that.
Jenny Chu said,
September 7, 2025 @ 4:56 am
Another reason students might have trouble with literary works in The Canon is that there is a lot of factual knowledge assumed and some vocabulary that goes with it. Read any novel written around wartime, and you'll find a hundred references to things that were common knowledge at the time but are now obscure. Demobbed – invalided out (WWI) Victory gardens (WWII) – Wrens (same) – "a repeat of Khe Sanh" (Vietnam) – prize money (Napoleonic wars). One of my favorite books is The Caine Mutiny, but I was born decades after WWII ended and I'm pretty sure there are parts of it I still don't understand.
Wartime jargon is a more extreme example but there are also simply situations that are difficult to understand without context. What is an entail and why are the Bennets worried about it? What is a "living" and why would a clergyman have one? In what way do someone's "rents" mean their income? I'm eternally grateful to my high school English teacher who sat us down to explain all these things _before_ we tackled Austen. And the lives young people lead now are even more remote from the lives then.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 7, 2025 @ 5:17 am
@GH — My statement was that the article in the Economist was flawed. The writer made a poor choice in using this particular study to make wider inferences.
Richard Hershberger said,
September 7, 2025 @ 8:55 am
Bleak House opens with references to Michaelmas, the Lord Chancellor, and Lincoln's Inn Hall. These are all obscure to modern Americans unless steeped in English literature (or, in the case of Michaelmas, Episcopalian). Yes, a proficient and motivated reader knows how to barrel through stuff like this, with a mental note to try to figure it out from context, but this is an obstacle, and may remain a mystery even after the several paragraphs in. Add to this the combination of sentence fragments and run-on sentences and this is tough going even for a proficient reader.
I also wonder what "students of literature" means. The hint is that they are literature majors, but it doesn't actually say this. They might be pulled from the General Education English classes. Sloppy writing, or motivated ambiguity?
David Y. said,
September 7, 2025 @ 10:40 am
Just recording a "huh" moment: why would the Educational Testing Service, which develops the SAT, offer classifications of score bands on the ACT, which it does not develop?
Philip Taylor said,
September 7, 2025 @ 12:55 pm
"I prefer to avoid reading Dickens, even if he has been canonized". My reaction was exactly the opposite, Barbara — I read the first few para.s of the online PDF, then went straight to Abebooks and ordered a hardbound copy.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 7, 2025 @ 2:10 pm
@Philip Taylor — For no particular reason I can discern, most of the English literature after Jane Austen and up to the beginning of the 20th century — basically , Victorian literature — just doesn't appeal to me. Music from that period, except for Gilbert and Sullivan, also is less interesting. It's been a consistent preference since junior high, so I have gotten used to having non-mainstream taste in many areas.
Chris Button said,
September 7, 2025 @ 2:51 pm
The print title is "The perils of book-spurning". The small descriptive subheadline is then "The decline of reading is making politics dumber, scholars fear." I believe The Economist does this for SEO reasons, although sometimes the practice buries their trademark witticism for online-only subscribers.
Weirdly, the political angle only comes right at the end of the piece.
Julian said,
September 7, 2025 @ 5:56 pm
@Barbara Phillips Long
I've tried Dickens several times over the years, without success
It's the verbosity.
Written for serials and paid for by the page, and it shows.
Life is too short.
Philip Taylor said,
September 8, 2025 @ 2:12 am
Well, each to their own, of course, but I personally rate Dickens far higher than Shakespeare, in part because Dickens was writing of a world to which I could relate, whereas Shakespeare was writing of a world that is so distant (in time) that I can barely relate to it at all.
Seonachan said,
September 8, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Can't see a debate about Dickens on a linguistics blog without thinking of this excerpt on Boston Brahmins from the documentary "American Tongues":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIGaVUO1kLI
Tom davidson said,
September 9, 2025 @ 12:53 am
The use of “less” to modify countable nouns (e.g. less dollars) is widespread.What happened to “fewer” ?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 9, 2025 @ 7:16 am
Tom D,
Some of us are still fighting the good fight. All in the service of clarity / bridging the semiotic chasm.
chris said,
September 10, 2025 @ 3:51 pm
This study was conducted in the United States, so you're not only measuring awareness of archaic slang, but archaic slang from another country.
If the phrase was "a large [nonsense word] with great whiskers" most people would interpret the whiskers as literal even if they DID know that used to be slang for human facial hair, so the only conclusion to be drawn is that some people over a century after Dickens's time and in another country don't know that "advocate" could be used as a noun meaning "lawyer". That doesn't exactly support sweeping conclusions about their cognitive abilities.