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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps your average college student is now illiterate in the style of what your academic or Pulitzer Prize board would consider essential to comprehend. Acclaimed fiction novels usually gain acclaim not by how direct and to the point they are, but how they twist at words and portray things in a particularly long winded fashion.

Could it be that people of today that have grown up reading prose that is mostly to get to the point, and convey what is needed now do not have the ability to meander like that? If so, does this make them "illiterate"?

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I had a very similar view to this for a long time. Then I sat down and actually read some difficult novels, but good ones. They are difficult to read but not in the same way that, say, bad social science research is--full of jargon and overly long sentences so the author looks smart. Good novels are difficult because they use language in interesting ways to convey more information than just a dry scientific description of how one event followed another towards the resolution of the plot, like you'd find in most crime novels for example.

It really is worth actually learning to read good books. They aren't hard for the sake of being hard. But they also aren't simple for the sake of being simple.

I wonder if our prestige has moved from having knowledge of difficult works (in difficult English, in other languages, in historic English) to having knowledge on a breadth of subjects.

Someone telling me they’ve read Virgil in Latin reads like a party trick to me. It’s certainly neat, but begs me to ask “why?” rather than inspiring awe. Someone being able to have an engaging conversation on macroeconomics, Supreme Court precedents from 50 years ago, and trends in social media is much more impressive.

That’s not to say there’s no value in acclaimed works, but the value now seems intrinsic rather than societal accolades. No one is impressed when your email about a meeting next week is a paragraph long sentence that requires a thesaurus to understand.

It's certainly helpful to be more literate, if nothing more than to ensure you are understood by others. For example, your comment's readability is improved by adding punctuation and some extra words:

> Could it be that people of today that have grown up reading prose that is mostly to get to the point, and convey what is needed now do not have the ability to meander like that? If so, does this make them "illiterate"?

Could it be that people of today have grown up reading prose that is mostly focused on getting to the point, conveying only what is needed, so much that they lack the ability to meander like fiction writers? If so, does this make them "illiterate"?

sort of. im no scholar but i think learning to appreciate writing for the prose, style, and vocabulary and not only the story should be required in higher education

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