Orwell - "Politics and the English Language"

I can see where Orwell is coming from. In the second paragraph, he decries the decline of a language as a vicious cycle because when people have foolish thoughts, “it [the language] becomes ugly and inaccurate,” but then this in turn makes it easier for people to go right back and have foolish thoughts because they may have read some of the “bad English” (as Orwell uses later in the paragraph) which caused them to think foolishly. It’s not really the reader’s fault; they were just reading some foolish words. That is what’s so powerful about a language. When reading, for example, certain words bring up certain thoughts in the reader. Therefore, the writer can somewhat control your thoughts by carefully picking and choosing the words he writes down. I like what Orwell says about verbs becoming phrases in modern English in the paragraph Operators or verbal false limbs. Many times, phrases like “gave rise to” aren’t really needed and make a sentence seem wordy, which actually hurts the writing. Instead, these phrases can be replaced with just one word like “initiated.” Orwell’s discussion about political language consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” made the point of his article clearer to me. It made me realize how the vagueness of modern language doesn’t do justice to what is actually meant. For example, Orwell says the political phrase elimination of unreliable elements refers to when, “People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps.” Someone who reads the phrase elimination of unreliable elements probably wouldn’t have thought that it meant people getting shot in the back of the neck. In the end, “the fight against bad English” should not solely be the concern of professional writers. Rather than just imitating what is heard, people should go through the trouble of thinking clearly and saying what they mean.

Manguel pages 125-223

It’s interesting how just the shape of a book influences a reader’s perception of the book and his reading experience; I never really thought about that. Teachers have traditionally told their students to not judge a book by its cover, so it’s ironic how Manguel just blankly states on the first page of this section that he does judge a book by its cover. Manguel makes an interesting point on the following page that just making the book larger could, from the reader’s perspective, add authority to it. He says that, “A book of laws [the Middle Assyrian Code of Laws] in such a large format surely added, in the eyes of the Mesopotamian reader, to the authority of the laws themselves” (Manguel 126). If I were living back then in ancient Mesopotamia and saw some huge book, I would also be impressed with its size. This is just one way how the physical characteristics of a book can affect the reader’s perception. After reading on the next page about how it was far more difficult to make commentaries on papyrus, I felt thankful that our society uses paper. I can’t imagine having little space with which to make comments on; when I read, I am constantly adding marginalia because it helps me remember important points or things that stood out to me.

There is an interesting paradox on page 154 about how reading in bed both opens and closes the world around us. Reading in bed closes the world around the reader because there’s a special sense of privacy in bed, so he’s “invisible to the world,” as Manguel puts it (153). Moreover, the reader is all absorbed in what’s happening in the book, so he’s not really aware of what’s happening around him. At the same time, reading in bed opens the world around the reader because, in this relaxed state, he’s more amenable to learning something outside of his current knowledge base, so the mind is open to new ideas and thoughts, leading to the brain absorbing what it’s reading. In the final analysis, reading is not just a visual experience. It encompasses touch and the emotions of the reader, as well.

"Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain

It does not really come as a surprise to me that reading has declined over the past few decades. I tend to think that, in general, this generation of kids and teenagers has gone away from doing things such as reading books to doing things like surfing the Internet and playing electronic gaming systems like XBox. These forms of modern entertainment make it harder to just calmly read a book. A quote from the sixth paragraph of the article seems to support my belief: "As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation -- even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago."

I was actually kind of surprised that some of the statistics were not worse. The statistic in the second paragraph of the article said, "In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002." I would have thought that the percentage drop would have been greater in the 20 year period from 1982 to 2002 because technologies like the Internet were used by many more people in 2002 than in 1982.

I agree with the scholar Walter J. Ong's speculation "that television and similar media are taking us into an era of "secondary orality," akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text" (fourteenth paragraph of the article). With the advent of new technologies, we seem to be moving away from face-to-face interactions to indirect ways of communication (e-mail, for example).

This article raises an important concern, "that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special 'reading class'" (seventh paragraph of the article). It makes you realize the huge impact that technology has had on how much time this generation now spends reading for pleasure as compared to previous generations.

Introduction

Greetings fellow classmates,

My name is Dylan Galbraith.  I am a sophmore at Kennesaw State University with a major in English; I'm hoping to become an editor. I live at home with my parents and two siblings. It is about a 20-30 minute commute to the campus from where I live. I look forward to getting to know everyone a little better and to having a great semester.

Thanks,

Dylan Galbraith