Salutations. As I was reading chapter four of AOTD I saw something that I would like to point out. Although Postman does already points this out himself, I wanted to expand on it a bit.
In the beginning of that chapter Postman discusses the political debates between Lincoln and Douglas. He explains how the debates were conducted and he illustrated what kind of an event it was for the public. In his description he includes several excerpts from the two political figures. The complexity of the sentences, the rich vocabulary, and the structure of the sentences struck me. As I was reading I thought, "Wow I have no idea what I just read. How did the people that attended the debates even understand what Lincoln and Douglas were saying?" Shortly after reading the excerpts Postman states that despite how hard Lincoln and Douglas were to understand, the crowd understood in full and could follow along with ease, however; the detail that I found the most interesting was when Postman states that Lincoln and Douglas weren't even candidates for the senate, yet people were gathering to hear their debates. They were essentially "nobodies", but they still had a crowd to preach to.
In today's world I'm not so sure that would happen. People would look at Lincoln and Douglas (during that time) now and call them "insignificant" and wouldn't listen to what they had to say. People don't listen to the beauty of speech just for fun anymore, and that's such as same. We all seem to be too busy to do such things. I mean how many people have attended a speech competition that our school has held "just because". People just either go for a close friend or family member or for extra credit.
We live in the Age of Show Business, as Postman calls it, and we need to be entertained. It's pretty sad actually.
So let me know what you think my fellow bloggers. Thank you for your time.
Hey, I'm reading Postman today too.
ReplyDeleteAriel, I took the liberty of copy/pasting your post, and running it through Microsoft Word's Readability Statistics, and here is what I found:
Your post is 332 words long, 5 paragraphs, 21 sentences.
On average, you have 4.2 sentences per paragraph, 15.8 words per sentence, and 4.5 characters per word.
4% of your sentences are passive; the readability scale is 69.3 (80-100 is super simple, 40 and below is super complex; the minimum score for plain English is 60. Your post measures at 7th grade reading level -- and most public documents and newspaper articles are written for a 7th grade reading level.
Interesting, isn't it? I should take that paragraph from Postman and run it through the same process.
OK Ariel, I didn't use that same passage from Postman -- I used an online article that seems pretty typical of his style. I didn't feel like typing that much stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the article is called Science and the Story that We Need and it was written in 1997. The passage I selected was 334 words long (I tried to get close to yours), 3 paragraphs long, and 11 sentences.
As you can surely imagine with fewer paragraphs and sentences overall, his paragraphs are 3.7 sentences long, and his sentences have on average 30 words. So his sentence complexity is much higher.
He has more passive sentences (36%), and his readability scale is very complex -- 26.1. The reading level required is 12th grade.
We struggle with Postman -- we do! But honestly, AP is a college level course. We SHOULD be reading 12th grade material. And a little more honesty: I teach seniors, and they would absolutely struggle with Postman. It's not like reading The Fault in Our Stars, that's for sure.
That is interesting Ms. Fletcher! No wonder I had to read the first chapter of Postman's book three times in order to understand him. Thank you for not only taking your time to read my post, but for also evaluating at what reading level it is at and comparing it to Postman's work. You know at first I thought that this blog would be the hardest part of your summer work because I struggle with shyness and didn't really know how I was going to put myself out there to blog, but once I had completed a significant amount of the blogging, I really started to enjoy it. This blog is really cool because it gives me an escape and it connects me with my classmates on a level that social media could never reach. Also the reason why I think that this blog is so enjoyable is because you are so involved in it. I can really feel that you want us to succeed, you want us to become better writers, and that means a lot when so many teachers lack to passion you have. Thank you for what you do. I hope that I am able to be a part of your class when September comes.
Delete:) I hope so too. Just finish your work. That's all you need to do. I know it's a bunch of work, though. I know that it's not easy.
DeleteAn audience is really one of the best things for a writer. Knowing that someone (besides a teacher) will read your work helps so much. It changes the writer's mindset.