Maybe. Except for that pesky fact that pleasure reading among young adults is on the rise. And quite signigicantly I might add.
DAMN these young people reading for mere pleasure! Reading is a DUTY required for Chistian civilization, and only for purposes of procreation among married couples. Reading should be limited to the Bible… and sex manuals.
Given that the students I teach tend to be in the age range of the referenced research, I would say that they possibly are at the BEGINNING of their forays into reading. I do know that when I ask my students what they read, the response tends to be a blank, deer-in-the-lights expression.
I can remember going to the drive in movie theater in my dad and going home in my mother.
Yeah, but **what **are they reading? People like that *Twilight *woman have terrible, terrible, terrible prose.
And what they may be reading may not have been rigorously edited or proofread.
Or what Shot said.
Heck, a large fraction of those aren’t even about the movie in the DVD (or about the book between the covers). Well, in theory they are, but it’s an easily-disproven hypothesis rather than a scientific theory. Sometimes you get a synopsis for Some Like It Hot which says something like “Sugar (Monroe) and Joe (Curtis) woo the Caribbean in this romantic escapade.” The example has been extracted from my left elbow, but I’ve seen beauties like that way too many times.
That’s a very popular series from a mainstream publisher, isn’t it? Whatever you may think of her prose style, I highly doubt that significant spelling or genuine grammatical errors appear with any frequency in her published works…
Irrevelant. Your average “well read” person reads tons of shit (I work in a library, I know what you read). Just because you (the general you, not you you) consider the shit you read to be better than Twilight or [insert derided book series here] doesn’t make it so.
It’s not irrelevant when the writing actually **is **bad. Just because a lot of what makes books “good” or “bad” is subjective doesn’t mean that **all **of it is. Twilight isn’t going to give you the benefits that a well-written book will: it won’t expand your vocabulary, it won’t introduce you to more complex grammatical structure, it won’t even give you well-worded sentences all of the time.
It probably won’t teach you to avoid comma splices, either.
Or vampires.
I think you’re off-base here. Viva can vouch for this, but a college essay turned in that was of the prose quality of Twilight would probably be in the very top tier of student essays.
Here’s an excerpt from one of her books:
So, not great prose. But there are plenty of complex sentences. There’s a use of the subjunctive in there. There are some words that aren’t super-complicated, but are also not kindergarten-level vocabulary either.
Again, a student who’s read plenty of Twilight and who writes as well as Stephanie Meyer will do just fine on the college level.
Yep.
Leaving aside the issue of content, if my students put together sentences that read like the quote provided by LHoD, my job would be orders of magnitude simpler.
We’re talking basic things like proper use of subordinate clauses, subject/verb agreement, avoiding dangling modifiers, and a whole bunch of other stuff that competent writers take for granted. A significant proportion of the population finds this sort of thing very difficult, and as a result produces prose that is incredibly bad, and in some cases literally indecipherable…
Precisely. Oh, if only the students could manage at Meyer’s level.
That Raguleader actually followed directions is a great thing–and a very rare thing among college students, I must say.
If I could get them to check the damn syllabus any time after the first week of classes would be a dream come true as well.
I had a meeting with a student who’s failing my class yesterday, and he flat out admitted that he’d never even read the syllabus, so his failure to hand in any assignments and his failing the exam was because he simply did not know (and seemingly did not care, based on his blase attitude) when anything was due.
I mean, I can help students who are struggling with the course material, but what can you do with someone so detached from something that they voluntarily chose?
I had a similar experience in a history class at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The assignment was to review Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which in truth I found interminably dull and barely even got through it.
I struggled to create a paper that I felt was at least coherent enough to get a passing grade.
When he returned the papers, the professor took me aside and suggested that pehaps my work was not entirely my own, as it seemed too “polished” to have been written by a mere student. He was careful not to actually accuse me of plagiarism in so many words, but I completely freaked at the insinuation and panickingly tried to assure him I’d written every word. The next day I sent him a stack of my old papers to show him the writing style was consistent, and a full-page single-spaced letter further defending myself.
He gave me back the package and told me not to worry – my initial reaction was all he’d needed to convince him I didn’t plagiarize. Well, gosh, thanks. I feel so much better now. I did get an A for the class, though…
How Interesting.
You have to stop interfering with their self-sabotage efforts.
Note: in at least some cases, the failing and/or plagiarizing international students stay enrolled because they have to maintain a certain number of units. That doesn’t mean they have to keep showing up to class after the drop date, though. Why bother?
Heh. But that would demonstrate a lack of concern for student retention, one of the major goals of the college! However would I justify my existence?
My international students are actually usually my best students. They almost always show up, work hard, participate in class discussions. The majority of my failing/plagiarizing students are American-born and raised. I do think that most of them are in college because their parents told them “college, job, or get out of my house,” or they need to stay on their parents’ insurance.