lingo / engagement with literature
Jan. 10th, 2008 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Washington Post: Mexican police combat ignorance by translating great works of literature into police code.
I read the headline and the blurb and was horrified. Why on earth would you want to do such a thing? Why would you want to re-cast literature in lingo?
The worst reading experiences of my life have been reading academic texts written in made-up academic lingo by the 'pioneers of a new field' (hypertext in the mid 90s) who were doing their damnedest to make said new field entirely inaccessible to anyone else, which is the usual function of lingo. Using created, proprietary language like that is the worst impediment to actual understanding that i can think of.
But then I read the article and realized that no, it was not that some committee was doing this, it is that the police officers themselves were doing it at workshops.
And it made a lot more sense.
This is a way for them to engage with the text and take ownership of it. It's not that they couldn't understand the literature as it was, it's just that it seemed irrelevant, seemed like not part of their lives, and it was difficult for them, unaccustomed to reading as they were, to engage with the text deeply enough to get interested.
But putting it this way, working with it in a way both entertaining and engaging, means that they have something invested in the text. It makes it into something they can own.
I'm a fan of anything that helps people become part of what they're reading. It's something that comes naturally to me and is one of my chief pleasures, but it doesn't always come to me-- I've had to read plenty of things I didn't engage with.
I think I've even used this technique before. Stuck reading something you can't enjoy? Translate it. It's like the LOLcat Bible.
I think we did something similar to our high school alma mater. Which is probably why I remember it so well.
And also indubitably why I can't remember whether the line is "Across thy open hilltop" or "across thy golden hilltop", because what I can clearly remember is the edited version, which was "across thy broken hilltop".
Anyway, having expected to be outraged by what some dumb-down-niks were doing, I was pleasantly surprised that instead I was cheered up by what some creative everyday-folks were doing. So I thought I'd share. And pass the link on to my mom.
I read the headline and the blurb and was horrified. Why on earth would you want to do such a thing? Why would you want to re-cast literature in lingo?
The worst reading experiences of my life have been reading academic texts written in made-up academic lingo by the 'pioneers of a new field' (hypertext in the mid 90s) who were doing their damnedest to make said new field entirely inaccessible to anyone else, which is the usual function of lingo. Using created, proprietary language like that is the worst impediment to actual understanding that i can think of.
But then I read the article and realized that no, it was not that some committee was doing this, it is that the police officers themselves were doing it at workshops.
And it made a lot more sense.
This is a way for them to engage with the text and take ownership of it. It's not that they couldn't understand the literature as it was, it's just that it seemed irrelevant, seemed like not part of their lives, and it was difficult for them, unaccustomed to reading as they were, to engage with the text deeply enough to get interested.
But putting it this way, working with it in a way both entertaining and engaging, means that they have something invested in the text. It makes it into something they can own.
I'm a fan of anything that helps people become part of what they're reading. It's something that comes naturally to me and is one of my chief pleasures, but it doesn't always come to me-- I've had to read plenty of things I didn't engage with.
I think I've even used this technique before. Stuck reading something you can't enjoy? Translate it. It's like the LOLcat Bible.
I think we did something similar to our high school alma mater. Which is probably why I remember it so well.
And also indubitably why I can't remember whether the line is "Across thy open hilltop" or "across thy golden hilltop", because what I can clearly remember is the edited version, which was "across thy broken hilltop".
Anyway, having expected to be outraged by what some dumb-down-niks were doing, I was pleasantly surprised that instead I was cheered up by what some creative everyday-folks were doing. So I thought I'd share. And pass the link on to my mom.
