Tag: reading

Letter Spacing and Readability (particularly for dyslexia)

Letter spacing. Read this.

Two European researchers have demonstrated that increasing the spacing between letters help students with dyslexia read faster, bumping up their reading ability by about a year. Their app for testing your best reading spacing, DYS, is free.

Robert Lee Hotz has the details.

Unlike having to use expensive fonts, like dyslexie, letter spacing is very easy to change on a webpage, and anyone should be able to change the preferences on their browser; for Mozilla Firefox you can change the letter-spacing using User CSS (which is not quite as easy as changing it in the preferences).

ᔥ Hotz, 2012.

U.S. Senators’ 10th Grade Speeches

NPR presents the results of a Sunlight Foundation study that showed that U.S. senatorial speeches average at a 10th grade reading level. The maximum is about 16th grade (high school + 4 years of college), while the minimum is about 8th grade. The average is down one and a half grade levels from just 10 years ago.

Note that the U.S. constitution was written at an 18th grade level.

Harry Potter and the Making of the Peace

Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.

… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.

— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.

It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.

This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.

Among their other recommendations are:

  • the breaking the monopoly of the Daily Prophet on the news media,
  • a Comprehensive Curse Ban Treaty,
  • more transparency at the Ministry of Magic,
  • a Charter on the Rights of Witches and Wizards,
  • “that the Wizengamot, the high council of Magical Great Britain, be split into separate legislative and judicial bodies,”
  • and closing Azkaban immediately.

You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.

I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).

Serialized Canticle

The science fiction classic,A Canticle for Leibowitz, is available in the public domain as an adapted audio serial from Old Time Radio via the Internet Archive.

Inspired by the author’s participation in the Allied bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II, the novel is considered a masterpiece by literary critics. It has been compared favorably with the works of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Walker Percy, and its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research.

— Internet Archive

You can play it here.

Making Text Easier to Read

Christian Boer, who is dyslexic, has come up with a new font designed to make text easier for dyslexics to read. There are a number of changes to the letters themselves, such as making the bottoms heavier, enlarging the openings, and making similar letters look more different. But, Boer’s website also offers advice on how to lay out text: separate paragraphs with space; avoid right justification; use columns instead of having text across the entire page, and so on.

Unfortunately, the Dyslexie font is not yet available in the U.S..

When I was choosing the layout for this blog, I was aiming for something that would be easy and enjoyable for me to read; I tend to be a little picky about my reading and writing environment. Interestingly, many of my own preferences align well with the ones noted above, but there seem to be a number of improvements I can still make to improve readability for everyone. Abigail Marshall has some additional advice on Web Design for Dyslexic Users.

And Poetry Soothes the Savage Beast

Poetry can be disjointed, illogical and irrational. Sam Tanenhaus argues that that is why poetry helps us make sense of catastrophes and disasters.

One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. …

But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.

— Tanenhaus (2011): The Poetry of Catastrophe, on the New York Times’ Arts Beat Blog.

Andrew Sullivan, on the Daily Dish, highlights W. B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” as being quite apt to the topic. It was written just after World War I (Poem of the Week).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— Yeats (1919): The Second Coming, (via Poets.org).

Keynes and Hayek

I used my notes and the Keynes versus Hayek music video as part of our reading this week. As usual, half the class tried skipping directly to the video, but it became pretty clear, as I suspected it would, that they didn’t understand what was going on if they had not read the notes.

We’ll be discussing the video tomorrow when we try to wrap up the week’s work, but, as one student mentioned, it can be a little hard to figure out the words in the rap. Fortunately, the Econ Stories website has been updated to include the lyrics.

Even without the lyrics, however, I really like that you can get a good idea about the competing economic theories solely from the video itself, since it’s just a very detailed extended metaphor. It’s so chock full of symbols that it could probably be used to supplement the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in our language lessons on finding symbols in texts.

How to memorize a poem

My students are working on poetry this cycle and I’m having them each memorize and present each of the different types of poems we’re covering.

Jim Holt suggests memorizing poems slowly over time:

… the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits.
— Holt (2009): Got Poetry?

But I very much like John Hollander’s advice to use the rhythm of the poem to help with memory:

It is partly like memorizing a song whose tune is that of the words themselves.
–Hollander (1995): Committed to Memory

Another approach, which worked for Michael Weiss, was to type out pairs of lines in a word processing program.

It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they’ll come faster than that.
–Weiss (2009): How to memorize a poem

All of the essays cited above also make persuasive arguments for why anyone should memorize poems. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that poems in memory are readily available for reflection. You get a feel for the rhythm and musicality, and you get to look at the words in different ways as you turn them around in your mind, playing with their meanings.

Finally, my students have become pretty good at presenting poetry, partly because they’ve seen Shake the Dust, but mainly because of our doing poetry every morning. Good presentations in the past have ratcheted up the quality of the presentations we’ve been seeing.

We’ve already started on haikus, but next week my students will be presenting sonnets. So far, things look promising.