The way they wanted the students to read and explicate sentence by sentence is really a bad way to go about reading a novel. Even for his 1850's audience, Dickens was not expecting everyone to know what the job of the Lord Chancellor was on reading the first sentence. Nearly all of the potentially mysterious references in the first paragraph (other than megalodon) become clear as you read on, and that is how reading fiction ALWAYS works. You aren't supposed to stop and look up every single thing you are unfamiliar with, you're supposed to go with the flow and most things become clear as you proceed. So the test is antithetical to how students would normally read this book for class.
Wordiness: People forget just how profoundly the telegraph transformed prose style in the later 19th century. At some point between Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, authors adopted a much simpler, more direct and less wordy way of writing. I forget where I first read (30+ years ago) that this was due to the telegraph, which charged people by the word, forcing them to be brief. Brevity started in journalism, with a new, short winded style of reportage that cost less for transmitting over the wire, and spread from there to fiction, nonfiction, and basically every kind of writing. The new "telegraphic prose" style was shocking and innovative at first, then it became fashionable, and finally so universal that we only notice its absence when reading work that does not utilize it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2025-05-17 04:01 pm (UTC)Wordiness: People forget just how profoundly the telegraph transformed prose style in the later 19th century. At some point between Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, authors adopted a much simpler, more direct and less wordy way of writing. I forget where I first read (30+ years ago) that this was due to the telegraph, which charged people by the word, forcing them to be brief. Brevity started in journalism, with a new, short winded style of reportage that cost less for transmitting over the wire, and spread from there to fiction, nonfiction, and basically every kind of writing. The new "telegraphic prose" style was shocking and innovative at first, then it became fashionable, and finally so universal that we only notice its absence when reading work that does not utilize it.