So yesterday I downloaded some bookd from google books

[nadinbrzezinski]

and there is something that became very clear very fast. Folks I downloaded a book written in 1925 or so about how to write a short story. The level of English in this HS text would be in the graduate level in college. This is a High School, first year of college textbook.

I went OH MY.

No this is not about things were better in the past. We have lots more info to convey to people in HS or college than even back then. But things like what we consider correct and proper English construction have been dumbed down, severely dumbed down. It is actually sad to see.

I also downloaded some history that I know it has been severely superseded in its knowledge, but those will be good for the novel I'm writing. Some of those conclusions on ancient history are just damn perfect for what I want to do. Yet I also noticed that. These books, written for a literate audience of their age in a very specialist area of knowledge... are written in English that you do not see today in journals.

So yes, something has happened to us, and it is easy to notice in choice of words. I'd say these people used more words than we do. Just a guess... and if any of you is curious... google up Citizen Kane, as in the screen play. Then download any modern screen play. You will notice that there is less writing in it.

So we do have to wonder if this is a good thing.

Oh and my book reader is now loaded wiht a bunch of stuff that I'd have to go to very specialized libraries to find.

[HopeHoops]

1. "google up"? Perhaps making your point clear?

Non-sequitor had a great cartoon a few weeks ago. A man was standing in front of a table, having obviously just blown the shit out of his laptop with a handgun. A woman was standing in the doorway with a child saying something like, "Grampa just saw the word 'Facebook' turned into a verb."

I know the wording was much better than what I quoted, but that's the general point.

[msongs]

2. today's crowd can only txt msg lol nt

[Better Today]

3. Yep, my daughter and I got into an argument about such just last evening.

She's a 24yo professional, but insists on using "always," and "never," and other similar terms when conversing. I said "y'know, just last week you were relatively happy with that person. Today the way you're speaking you'd think you never got along with that person. Perhaps if you didn't exaggerate things right now to the never/always arena . . ."

She interrupted, "well, I don't mean always and never, it just what everyone says, everyone knows it isn't really meant that way."

She literally then spent about 1.5 hours arguing that no one has a right get upset or offended when she says things like that and they should just understand that what she says isn't what she means.???? Go figure.

Now with texting and such I fear it will only get worse.

[Lorien]

27. I feel like an old fart, but I honestly can't understand some of the things

that a few 20 somethings I know write to me. I have to re-read their broken sentences several times over to get the gist of the idea they are trying to get across. It's not everyone; my next door neighbor is 23 and she writes beautifully; there's no ambiguity at all in any of her sentences. However, I'm guessing that the ones I can't understand do a huge amount of texting. In fact, I know that most of them do.

[jberryhill]

43. Yeah, well, you know, u r pwn3d, ROFLMAO! /nt

[Lorien]

46. No, I'm not "pwn3d"

but some of the people I know who can't communicate effectively are. They keep wondering why they a). can't find work, and b). don't keep work for long when they do find it. When part of the job requirement involves emailing questions, answers and updates to your client daily and you can't construct a sentence that they can actually understand, it's a real problem.

[Subdivisions]

36. Ooohhh! I can't stand being accused of the always/never whatever. n/t

[exboyfil]

4. This is why I have been trying to get my daughters to read

some of the English classics (which were popular literature in their day). I have a stack of Wells, Stevenson, Twain, Bronte, etc that I am trying to get my girls to read. These were standards for me when I was a kid (along with London, Dumas etc). Even though they consume Harry Potter it is no go for these books (at least to this point). I am not asking them to read Joyce (which I think is highly overrated). I can't believe one generation makes so much difference.

[KoKo]

7. One thing might be lack of time. Things move very fast for kids these days.

They'd much rather be participating in Face Book and texting along with all their activities. Finding a spot to curl up with a book isn't easy for kids raised with TV on and constant stimulation from the crib on.

It's just the way it is. And, look at what passes for language in the news reporting. Look at how the Mainstream media any groups of adults (despite gender or age) referred to as "You Guys" no matter what their profession is. Everyone says "You Guys" today...but is it proper reference? Or a way of dumbing down people. Then there are the "Golly Gee!" antics of that Alex Witt and Contessa Brewer, Norah O'Donnel on MSNBC and CNN's HIP HOP sports guy along with the one the chatty Cathy and the other male Anchor who finds everything "Just Incredible."

Where do they get these people?

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Same thing with my NIece in Mexico

Potter is cool... Joyce, Cervantes and Vasco de Vega, not so much.

[lunatica]

5. I think it's more of a natural evolution of language and communication

Since 1925 writing and telling stories has changed on a fundamental level. First the comic books brought visual stories with writing as narrative. Then with the advent of TV writing for it became secondary to the visual part of the storytelling. Before all this writing a story depended almost entirely on words which created the mental images in the mind, with a few illustrations.

It's sad to feel we are losing the richness of language, but I think it's inevitable that language evolves. Who would sit long enough to read Charles Dickens unabridged books now? I wouldn't and yet his stories are still wonderful and have inspired re-telling in all mediums from comic books to cinematic animation and CGI infused movies.

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. This goes beyond language evolution

and lord knows I got to see it in college. I had to read 16th century Spanish, no, not nicely translated, in the original texts before Spanish got ahem formalized, as in the alphabet. So I know about language evolution. Usually as language evolves it imports language and becomes richer. NO, it is more like we are losing that complexity.

[geckosfeet]

6. Language is malleable.

If it weren't, we would all be speaking (and writing) something very different than english.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. It is and to be exact we do not even speak or write English,

we speak American. But it is amazing the richness of language we have lost. IMO this is the first time we see this.

[FLyellowdog]

8. It's called the "dumbing down" of America. nt

[NYCGirl]

9. That's what everyone said about comic books in the 1950s. NT

[mitchum]

10. That's because television does what it was intended to do

[Warren Stupidity]

14. On the other hand you can download the world library.

And we have an encyclopedia in Wiki that has rendered all earlier efforts null and void. Yes perhaps our skill at wordsmithing is not up to the general standards of the literate world before movies and tv and the internet created a revolution in communication technology at least as profound as the movable type printing press that Gutenberg introduced to the europeans, but that is largely because we are moving beyond Gutenberg's revolution into something quantitatively different.

We can all ROFL at the kids texting each other all we want, but they are in an interconnected social system we don't really understand yet, and humans are evolving a new social mind, a new form of civilization, around us.

I downloaded Plutarch's Lives last night after listening to a series of podcast lectures on Rome. For free. In minutes. I went from listening about the subject to reading one of the primary sources and back again. On my time, at almost no cost. I no longer wonder if this is a good thing. It is a miraculous thing. The data at our command is breathtaking. Only the bounds of our imagination and curiosity limit our access.

[nadinbrzezinski]

31. No doubt the books I downloaded

to do my research for the novel are the type that used to be found ONLY at university libraries, and a few copies survive.

Hell I found a few that were the things you had to read in my field...

As well as well yes Plutarch, Plato and the rest...

But how many people are doing that?

Granted I will still have to get a few modern texts... and pay for them, and that is fine.

[Warren Stupidity]

32. "But how many people are doing that?"

A much better question is "how many people now can do that who just a few years ago could not possibly access this information?"

The technology I used is available to all of the industrialized and industrializing nations. The revolution in information access and human interconnection is stunning. Yes, we likely are and will continue to lose the skills of printed page technology - our writing will not be as good as our ancestors. There are always trade offs, but in this case the benefits really far outweigh what we are leaving behind.

[nadinbrzezinski]

33. And I will argue that most folks are NOT using their puters

for the wiki, or the books or other knowledge.

Yes more can but I have the sneaky that gaming is hotter. or texting.

Not that there is anything wrong with it... just that I do not believe we are that common Warren...

Ah the ebook reader will be heavily used though.

[Subdivisions]

37. My s/o and every single member of her family think the Internet is

primarily for accessing their MySpace pages. They wouldn't purposefully go anywhere near something educational.

[Warren Stupidity]

47. And 20 years ago they would not have been reading anything at all

- they would have been true couch potatoes, interconnected only by landline telephone, passive tv watchers, movie goers. One has to actually read a MySpace Page, and even write words to have a MySpace Page. Texting is a reading/writing operation. I agree that the quality of wordsmithery is way down from what it was two generations ago, and has been declining in some respects since the emergence of movies as a dominant media format. However the democratization of access and publishing of all forms of media including written words, and the vast interconnection of people through facebooks, twitter, texting, message boards, email. etc. - all at least partially text based is changing the very meaning of literacy. For example, in Japan, an entire new publishing format has emerged based around texting format cell phone 'books'.

Literacy is doing the opposite of dying out - last year the US publishing industry alone put out 500,000 new books. It is exploding.

[Warren Stupidity]

44. ebook readers are flying off the (virtual) shelves

I don't know what "most folks" are doing, but all across the planet people, millions of people, are using wiki every day. See here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm 8,165,628 english language views per hour. 269 languages supported.

Yes sure 'we are not common' but there are 6,000,000,000 people on the planet and this 'uncommon we' is in the tens or hundreds of millions. We are archiving and accumulating data, knowledge, science and arts in all forms, at an increasing and astounding rate, and most of it is going online with free or inexpensive access to all: we are in the midst of a cultural explosion without precedent, and the threat to that is not that people are dumbing down, it is the fundamentalist reactionaries who fear that their way and their world and their god-myths have all come to an end that are the danger.

[phasma ex machina]

42. +1

[lpbk2713]

15. So ... um ... like, kewl.

:sarcasm: of course.


I lament the passing of the English language. All I can seem to do is wave as it fades off into obscurity.

[Jim__]

16. An example would help.

Are the differences you're finding examples of writing that is better than the today's writing, or do they just use a more varied vocabulary? Is the writing clearer? More stultified?

Following are some examples of writing that come to my mind.

A lot of people consider Henry James a great writer. I have a very hard time with him. Here's his opening paragraph for The Great Good Place, written in 1901:

George Dane had opened his eyes to a bright new day, the face of nature well-washed by last night's downpour and shining as with high spirits, good resolutions, lively intentions - the great glare of recommencement in short fixed his patch of sky. He had sat up late to finish work - arrears overwehlming, then at last had gone up to bed with the pile but little reduced. He was now to return to it after the pause of the night; but he could only look at it, for the time, over the bristling hedge of letters planted by the early postman an hour before and already, on the customary table by the chimney-piece, formally rounded and squared by his systematic servant. It was something too merciless, the domestic perfection of Brown. There were newspapers on another table, ranged with the same rigour of custom, newspapers too many - what could any creature want of so much news - and each with its hand on the neck of the other, so that the row of their bodiless heads was like a series of decapitations. Other journals, other periodicals of every sort, folded and in wrappers, made a huddled mound that had been growing for several days and of which he had been wearily, helplessly aware. There were new books, also in wrappers, as well as disenveloped and dropped again - books from publishers, books from authors, books from friends, books from enemies, books from his own bookseller, who took, it sometimes struck him, inconceivable things for granted. He touched nothing, approached nothing, only turned a heavy eye over the work, as it were, of the night - the fact, in his high windowed room where duty shed its hard light into every corner, of the srill unashamed admonitions. It was the old rising tide, and it rose and rose even under a minute's watching. It had been up to his shoulders last night - it was up to his chin now.

I have problems with James' writing, and a lot of writing from that era, because it seems like it never gets to the point.

Here's the opening paragraph from David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System from 1987:

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They're long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy's bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; and her bathrobe's opening a little, so there's some cleavage visisble and everything, a lot more than Lenore's got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy's wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy's face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo inn the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.

The vocabulary is less varied, but I think it sets the scene just as well as James' opening, and it is a lot easier for me to read and grasp.

Of course, I have to include an opeinng paragraph from Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite authors. This is from A Nursery Tale, 1926:

Fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy! Erwin knew these things well. In a tram, he would always sit on the right-hand side, so as to be nearer the sidewalk. Twice daily, from the tram he took to the office and back, Erwin looked out of the window and collected his harem. Happy, happy Erwin, to dwell in such a convenient, such a fairy-tale German town.

Nabokov always puts you in another world.

But some examples of what you're talking about would help to clarify if this change is for the better or not.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. Well you forgot to tell us partly why

this is BP, (before Papa) and AP (After Papa) Hemingway, as you probably know, took news paper standards of short concise and translated them to fiction. Well he was revolutionary. But we have taken the AP to the extreme.

[greennina]

17. Why would you support those theives?

They don't support the authors.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. Because a book printed and released in 1880 does not have copyright

not do Homer's works... for example.

Copyright, and I am an author, does not go on ad infinitum.

They have entered what we call PUBLIC DOMAIN.

[anigbrowl]

23. They've been straighter with me than my original publishers were

Not that I expect to make any money out of them since my work on computing is deeply out of date, but at least I can see how many times it's been looked at and so forth.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. My mother kept her fourth grade reading textbook for some reason

Today it would be considered a seventh- or eighth-grade level reader. It contained unabridged poems and slightly edited and simplified excerpts from Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels, finishing off with the full text of John Ruskin's King of the Golden River. Schoolchildren in that era also memorized poetry and speeches from Shakespeare.

I think it enriched their language.

I once applied for a job as a free-lance editor of books published for use in elementary schools, and I was horrified at the sample they sent me. Its message was fine: save the rain forests. However, the execution was terrible. The story was written in simple, dull, graceless sentences, and the characters were one-dimensional and didactic. It was such a dreadful piece of writing that I imagined children reading it and wanting to hop onto a plane to Brazil to torch a kapok grove.

I said as much, and of course, I didn't get the job--from a major publisher.

If that piece of drivel is typical of what educational publishers are supplying to schools, then no wonder so many kids don't want to read for pleasure.

[Violet_Crumble]

21. I'm guessing people read less now than they used to...

Probably the arrival of technology and all that stuff might be a reason, but I'm not sure. Also, are people actually using less words now or has the vocabularly changed and new words have crept into the language?

[nadinbrzezinski]

24. I suspect we have lost some richness in the language

Though the technology may help reverse it. See google books project and stanza and others... mobile devices will allow those curious to read the classics

[onethatcares]

22. oh, hell

how many of you have gotten the email that shows how the brain doesn't mind mis-spelled words? That it werks itself owt on its' oen?

Well folks, it's not gonna get much better in the long term. It's hard werk to diagram a sentence or use the proper punciation and all that. Just think of how that would cut into the profits of the Ignite crew.

Personally, I can't stand misspelling, something the nuns of St. Margaret of the ruler broken knuckles enforced with a vigor.

[marshall]

25. A smaller percentage of people were completing high school back then

It was perfectly acceptable to drop out to get married, get a blue collar job, etc. As a result high school, especially the last two years, really was only educating the most intellectually gifted and/or the most tenacious.

We as a society have made a collective decision to try and include everyone in the education system, at least through high school. It's almost unheard of now to drop out at 16 unless one has some extreme reason. Flash back fifty years--it was almost as unheard of to complete all twelve years.

[proud2BlibKansan]

28. +1

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. And we have also made the decision that a College Degree

is the equivalent of HS anymore.

So there you have it.

So as a society we need to ask... whether this is ideal or not. Mind you we have never, evah reached the Emersonian ideal either.

[Fumesucker]

26. I grew up reading Poe, Dickens, London, Twain, Doyle, Burroughs and so on..

I agree with you, writing today for the most part has become less articulate and has a less varied vocabulary.

The average newspaper seems to be written on what I would consider a sixth grade level and the television news has become even more stultified and ignorant than that by a fair margin.

My father was fond of quizzing me on the Reader's Digest vocabulary words each month, by the age of ten or so it was rare for me to miss one.

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. For me it was Cervantes, Lope de Vega, a slew of Mexican Authors

I love the Celestina, and of course Shakespeare, London (I loved his books), Poe, and others.

And this is also happening in Mexico by the way.

[NYC Liberal]

34. "I'd say these people used more words than we do." I would doubt it.

Doing a little research, the illiteracy rate in the U.S. in the 1920s was about 6% (http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade20.html), while today it's about 1% or a little less than that.

I think you and others get confused because you see "different" words being used then and equate that with the people using them as being smarter. That isn't so. Vocabulary changes. The vocabulary of the past is often equated with being "more correct" or "more proper" because that is what it has been relegated to today. Because those words are used less often, they seem that way.

In 80 years people will be lamenting the dumbing down of their vocabulary, looking back to the early 2000s when people used "proper" grammar and words.

[nadinbrzezinski]

35. Do these numbers are also taking into account

FUNCTIONAL illiteracy?

[NYC Liberal]

38. Well now, what makes the vocabulary you talk about

any "better" than the vocabulary of today?

You say: "But things like what we consider correct and proper English construction have been dumbed down, severely dumbed down. It is actually sad to see."

My point is that what is "proper" English construction changes. The only way it could be better (or worse), I suppose, is if the changes impaired the reader's ability to understand the information. Simply being different is not enough to say that something is better or worse. It used to be people said "forsooth" ... now we say "indeed" or something similar. Sure, "forsooth" sounds fancy and educated, but that's only because the language has evolved such that now it's a rare word that we only encounter in things like Shakespeare's plays.

You see a similar thing with the 2nd person singular "thou" and plural "ye" (which have been replaced by "you"). Again, how we speak seems "dumbed down" comparatively - but only because we encounter our grammar and vocabulary everyday, so it seems commonplace and rather dull.

[nadinbrzezinski]

39. Here is the problem

usually language evolution brings in complexity and more words. We are at an era where I fear we have less words, in common usage that is.

I know language evolves... for god sakes anybody should understand that. But this is not about language evolution...

That's ok... I am sure I can ask a few experts (a cousin of mine does this for a living, she is a linguist) if this impression is correct... that American (and by the way other languages too) are losing it.

Though I do notice that you did not deal with functional illiteracy, which is an issue these days.

[NYC Liberal]

41. Well functional illiteracy is interesting

There aren't really any statistics to compare since "functional literacy" wasn't something that was being measured in the 1920s.

You can find some interesting reading here: http://social.jrank.org/pages/939/How-Educated-Are-We-Functional-Literacy-Educational-Attainment.html. (There are multiple pages - click the back and next links near the bottom.)

Quote

As expected, functional literacy goes up when educational attainment goes up. Those with less than a high school diploma performed 35% of the literacy tasks correctly; those with a college degree performed 65% of the tasks correctly. Ninety-five percent of those with less than a high school diploma functioned at the two lowest levels. This group had less than 1% functioning at the highest levels. Those with a college degree had the highest percentage functioning at the highest two levels (53%). However, 14% of those with a college degree function at the two lowest levels of proficiency. Surprising! Adults who are proficient at levels one and two are considered, by some, to be functionally illiterate. In 1992, this included 90 million adults (48% of the adult population).

According to a 1993 Education Week article on the National Adult Literacy Survey, this meant that "nearly half of all adult Americans cannot read, write, and calculate well enough to function fully in today's society…." Is this an accurate picture of nearly half of all the adults in America? Not necessarily. In the Literacy Survey, these adults were asked to rate their own literacy skills. Sixty-six percent to seventy-five percent of those functioning at Level 17 described themselves as being able to read and write English "well" or "very well". At Level 2, 93% to 97% described themselves this way. Some of those in these groups do get help from family and friends to perform everyday tasks, but the number is low: 14-25% of those at Level 1 and 4-12% at Level 2. This suggests that although 48% of the adult population is classified as "functionally illiterate," this doesn't prevent most of them from functioning in their personal and professional lives.

And then relating to literacy and employment:

Quote

Those employed full time performed the highest percentage of literacy tasks correctly (57.6%). Those in retirement averaged lowest (47%).

...because:

Quote

Most of the retired grew up in the first half of the 20th century. During that time, many had to quit school and go to work in order to help support the family. Many jobs in those days did not require a high school diploma.

I quoted a fair amount there but there's a lot more at the site and it's interesting reading, at least for me.

[mulsh]

40. was one of these books Ring Lardner's "How To Write Short Stories,

with Samples" 1924. It's not exactly an instruction manual. If you read it you will learn how to write short stories. You will also learn a bit about how to get paid for writing short stories. If you can find a copy buy it. If you can merely find the introduction read it. Twice.

I write a lot, though you wouldn't know from what I post. Good writing requires lots of practice. A friend of mine asked me to recommend a couple of writing guides. I recommended The American Heritage Dictionary (unabridged hard bound version), Fowlers English Usage, and a good Thesaurus. Oh and I also recommended he try to write at least 500 - 1000 word essays or journal entries or short articles, anything that length would do, the point was to write.

Most of the great final product we read it the result of constant honing and re-writing. It's a lot of work and most of us are too busy or lazy or just not able to do it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. I write as well, why I downloaded it

and let me check

Writing the Short Story

Essenwein.

And yes I know the practice and the editing and all that.

Right now reworking a novel...

No, not editing, not even out of crap draft... better known as draft zero.

For those who don't know... all first drafts are crap... get over it and reach for the editing pen!

Strunk and White and On Writing Well are friends of mine.