How are you reading this paragraph? Left to right, up and down, words make
sentences, and so on? Well, you’re
doing it wrong. Guess what, you’re
illiterate! We all are. You might say we’re reading-tarded. But now there’s hope!
A company called Walker Reading Technology has created a
tool called Live Ink which reformats text
into something that looks like programming code or teenage poetry. They say the old reading method fights
against biology, the new one helps readers absorb information better, and long
story short, kids’ test scores are guaranteed to rise like scholastic bottle
rockets.
Click the image and see which version reads more
easily. (Article from Venture Beat, via Slashdot.) This example stacks the deck a
bit, though. The “old school text” is
in three different fonts, and written in that irritatingly chatty, rhetorical
question style that you see in women’s magazines and “special advertising
sections.” For another example, see the
first paragraph of this post.
Now, I’m not saying it doesn’t work. These are some very smart people with grants
from the Department of Education and possibly some studies showing improved
test scores. I’m sure it works like a
charm. Unfortunately, it also
sucks. Like a sucky charm.
Check out their example of Moby-Dick in Live
Ink. Can you imagine reading the
entire book this way? First of all,
it would be eighty shajillion pages long. Secondly, it turns Herman Melville into a shitty teenage poet. When people first try to write poetry, they
break ordinary sentences into tiny breathless fragments because
every
single thought
that comes
into
my
brilliant mind
is so deep
and
meaningful
that they all
(and I)
deserve
your
com-
ple-
te
attention.
That’s not poetry, that’s stuttering. It all looks and reads the same. The cure for it is to read a lot of good
poetry until you can recognize your favorite poets’ work just by the
voice. If you kept writing all that
time, that should be just about when you discover your own voice. Hopefully it’s a good one, because you’re
stuck with it. Keep in mind, some
atrocious poets have distinctive voices, but all good poets do. You’ll have a lot of fun liquored-up
arguments about which is which.
“Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little
or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I
thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” Fuck yeah! Ishmael is now, at this moment, in da house. Superficially, here are some impressions that seep from that sentence: a
garrulous, somewhat defensive narrator, a rootless wanderer, unlucky but
hopeful, and he’s a different man now than he was back then. And “the watery part of the world” just
flows out in the course of conversation -- you’re halfway through the next
sentence before you notice its soothing, elegant beauty.
Now, that isn’t a poem, it’s a sentence, in a long, dense
book full of sentences like that. If
you like it, you’ll keep reading, and if you don’t, that’s fine too. Live Ink tries to cram it down your gullet
by squeezing it into the ugliest form possible, a “poem” literally written by a
machine:
Some years ago
-- never mind
how long precisely –-
having little
or no money
in my purse,
and nothing particular
to interest me on shore,
I thought
I would
sail about a little
and see the watery part
of the world.
That’s a fucking abomination. Melville loved language –- he loved digressions, scholarly
allusions, colorful jargon, typesetting jokes, conversational rhythms, and
letting different styles of writing suddenly bubble up within one
man’s narration. If you strip all that
out, “improved comprehension” is laughable. Listen: A guy goes to sea and his obsessive captain gets killed by a
whale. Now you “comprehend” Moby-Dick
as much as you’ll ever need to in ordinary life.
I like the idea of helping people who have trouble
reading. And plenty of sentences are
crappy enough that they lose nothing in translation. But if you really want to read Moby-Dick as opposed
to look at its sentences, try an unabridged audiobook. There’s no shame in that. However, I can say without exaggeration that
if you read the Live Ink version, Herman Melville will claw his way out of the
grave, ride the bus to your place, smash through the door, and coil a goddamn
rope around your neck.
And then he
will gnaw
your leg off.
Rrraaaah.
