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| Marking computer says no to lazy Dickens and dull Austen The official A-level higher English exam marking computer takes young Dickens, Austen and John the Evangelist to taskAs you know, children, we have run all of your mock A-level English papers through the government's official examination marking computer. You will have read in the Times this morning of the fiasco when Ernest Hemingway, William Golding, Winston Churchill and Anthony Burgess failed so spectacularly – frankly confirming my own view that they should have come to me far earlier to discuss their subject choices. I wish them well, obviously, but I fear their subsequent career experiences will amply bear out my reservations.I now have the results. I will pass your papers round, but I want to read to you a few extracts to demonstrate the scale of the problem we are tackling. Those of you whose names l mention, please stay behind after class to discuss your work in more detail.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …You will not be surprised to hear that the computer has marked this down for repetition and poor and restricted choice of vocabulary. I would like to add, class, that although John the Evangelist shows occasional flashes of inspiration, he is going to have to buckle down to some very serious work if he is to have any chance of achieving the grades he needs.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.I hardly need to tell you that the computer has failed Charles Dickens for repetition – repetition, I might add, so extreme that it looks to me very much like sheer laziness.No man is an island.Incomprehensible, the computer said. I say, John Donne, this is just a facile attempt to be smart. You might just as well write that no computer is a banana.It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.The computer has marked you highly for correct sentence construction and punctuation. Good use of clauses, Jane, but I must say this is a remarkably dull opening. Haven't we discussed the need to capture the attention of the reader immediately?Right, the rest of you may go. But I warn you, we all have a great deal of work to do this term.EnglishA-levelsWords and languageCharles DickensJane AustenMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Story of a Landing William Langewiesche argues that the plane itself deserves high credit for “the miracle on the Hudson.” feeds.nytimes.com |
The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Book review A handsomely bound 60-story collection, where the only mystery left unsolved is that of Holmes himself, says Jessica Holland "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive," Sherlock Holmes says on making Dr Watson's acquaintance in A Study in Scarlet, the opening tale of this handsomely bound, 60-story collection. When an astonished Watson asks how he could possibly know this, the detective chuckles to himself and murmurs: "Never mind."The majority of the tales in this complete works, which has been in print since the 1930s and is republished here with an introduction by Ruth Rendell, are told in the form of Watson's journal and set in a foggy but familiar Victorian London, with long sections narrated by other characters as they explain the puzzle they hope Holmes will untangle.In all of them – from the famously eerie The Hound of the Baskervilles to A Scandal in Bohemia, in which Holmes is dazzled by the only woman who succeeded in outfoxing him – the convoluted plot is never predictable and Holmes (a violin-playing, drug-addicted, ex-prize fighter, it turns out) becomes more enigmatic by the minute, the one mystery that never gets cleared away.The stories rarely stray from a formula. The novel The Sign of Four ends, as most Holmes stories do, with wrongdoers punished, the police getting the credit and a general sense of relief (in this one, Watson ends up happily engaged). But what about Sherlock himself? "'For me,'" he says, in the story's final paragraph, "'there remains the cocaine bottle.' And he stretched his long white hand up for it." It's this note of discord that turns Arthur Conan Doyle's stories from games of logic into something less neat and more human.Classicsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Solzhenitsyn's son says father's 'Old Testament' image is misleading 'His strident political tone was not compatible with typical western discourse,' Ignat Solzhenitsyn tells interviewer. 'Then people saw the beard'Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a humane and tolerant family man a long way from the angry dissident he is often remembered as, according to his son."There is this notion that Solzhenitsyn was so intolerant, that everything was black and white for him and, well — bollocks," said Ignat Solzhenitsyn, whose father made public the grim reality of Stalin's labour camps in his Nobel prize-winning writing. "He rejected flatly those who sought to reduce his art or everything that he was to a political equation."In an interview with the Times in New York to mark publication of the first complete English versionof his father's In the First Circle, Ignat – a pianist and conductor – spoke of a man who encouraged his sons to learn English as they grew up in America, sent them to local schools and encouraged them to pursue their own interests regardless of his own beliefs. "If this seems at odds with the image in the west then I'm here to testify that that image is largely inaccurate. There is a confusion between my father taking his work seriously and taking himself seriously. He was a man of great humility," he said.He believes it was partly his father's own fault that he was seen as an "embittered, angry prophet" – in 1978 he attacked the west in a speech at Harvard – because his "strident political tone was not compatible with typical western discourse". "Then people saw the beard and, well, two plus two equals Old Testament prophet. But that was a result of the urgency of the times he was living in. People did not understand the world he had come from," he said.The reason his father hid himself away from the world was a literary one, as he threw himself into writing his epic work The Red Wheel. "He wanted to go someplace quiet where he could work without distractions. He said that he wished that he could have had the luxury to spend more time collecting impressions, mingling with Americans and travelling. But he knew that The Red Wheel would take every ounce of his time and energy and so he made his choice," he told the Times. "The seclusion wasn't a question of 'I don't want to be seen'. I say this with certainty."Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008 aged 89. He first came to the world's attention with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962; In the First Circle, written between 1955 and 1958, was cut substantially to pass through Soviet censors before it was published in a hastily translated edition in 1968. Opening in Moscow on Christmas Eve in 1949, the novel follows the story of a mathematician in a Moscow prison asked to choose between helping the Soviet state or being transferred to the Siberian Gulag.Aleksandr SolzhenitsynFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Video: Observer Music Monthly – American legends Photographer Jamie-James Medina tells author Nick Tosches about the living legends of American music that he spent a year chronicling for Observer Music Monthly – from Jerry Lee Lewis to Pete Seeger, and Etta James to Sonny Rollins feeds.guardian.co.uk |