The Monkey Cage

To follow up on Lee’s post about the Milgram research:

In my political psychology class, the final exam includes a question about authority and its role in atrocities such as My Lai and the Holocaust. Two minor gems emerged. One student wrote her entire answer repeatedly referring to the seminal research of “Milgram Stanley.” Another (again, repeatedly) discusses the experiments of “Stanley Milligram.”

Neither approaches this (or, God knows, this), but I’ll blog what I’ve got.

[Addendum: “Milligram” is not induced by MS Word’s spell-check. MS Word would change “Milgram” to, interestingly, “Mailgram.”]

[Update: A student did refer to the “Mailgram” experiments.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A much-discussed study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that adolescents were reading fewer literary works, which may lead to a lower capacity for reading comprehension as well as writing ability.

These days I am particularly sensitized to the consequences of reading for writing ability because I am teaching a small writing-intensive seminar for graduating seniors. Some of the problems with students’ writing are grammatical, problems which could, in theory, be fixed with instruction in grammatical principles.

But other problems, in particular deviations from idiomatic usage, have no ready fix because they depend not on principles but on looser notions of what kinds of words “go together.” For example, a very smart student, who actually writes quite well, included this phrase in a recent paper: “quell the exaggeration.” I told him that exaggerations are not “quelled,” at least given how the word “quell” is typically used. This choice is not egregiously wrong — one definition of quell is “put an end to” — but it sounds off somehow.

It’s this kind of writing mistake that can only be minimized by reading. Over a period of time, reading will familiarize readers with the meanings of words, common usage, and thus how to put words together effectively in their own writing.

This is yet more reason to praise those who are trying to motivate reading.

Posted by John Sides at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)