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The Lifelong Learning of Lifelong Inmates
- Hnrobert42 9y agoI really wanted to enjoy the article, but I found the author's diction so clumsy I couldn't get through more tgan a few paragraphs. It was like he was trying to hard or something. Bummer.
- aphextron 9y ago>It was like he was trying to hard or something. It feels like most of The Atlantic is going that way. The quality has dropped significantly with their quantity. When you have such a strict requirement put on writers to do these long, drawn out pieces, it gets to a point of just filling out page count like a college essay or something.
- pmoriarty 9y agoThis article reads just fine to me, and The Atlantic's articles have been some of the most consistently excellent journalism I've ever read.
- eropple 9y agoYup. This is how you write when you want to be read emotionally: evocative and clean. This is something to take notes from, not complain about how unbloggably purple the prose here is (especially when it isn't).
- rndmio 9y agoI disagree, this is not clean writing. This reads like someone who swallowed a thesaurus to pad out their word count, and didn't really understand half the words they decided to use. Not to mention three number of poorly constructed sentences. I also couldn't get past the first few paragraphs as it so grated.
- eropple 9y agoI mean, we can workshop this if you're going to bring examples, but I'll be real with you: more often than not the charge of "swallowed a thesaurus" tends to come from folks who don't read all that much (and I do mean actually read, not read tech blogs). So, put up: what words did the author not "really understand"?
- danielvf 9y agoI agree with both of you. One one hand, the writer does understand the words they are using and uses them correctly. On the other hand the author clearly eschews words less than nine characters in length. Random grab from middle of article: "focusing too intently on quantifiable outcomes obscures what the essence of education, in prison or otherwise, is truly about."
- eropple 9y agoIn my neck of the woods, that's a reasonable phrase with words that have particular context to them that their synonyms don't.
- jackewiehose 9y agoOfftopic, but thank you for pointing that out. Since I'm not english I cannot judge the writing of such an article. For me it just feels like my english isn't good enough. So at least I know I'm not the only one.
- whiddershins 9y agoIs this comment, with two lexical errors, deliberately ironic? Edit: two errors
- Hnrobert42 9y agoSorry. Not ironic. Just mistakes.
- pmoriarty 9y agoI'd encourage anyone interested in this subject to read a book called "True Notebooks" about a writer teaching prisoners in juvenile hall.