The Megalosaurus Test

Here’s a fun game for you all (you can tell I’m a hoot at parties, right?)

Below is the first paragraph of Dickens’s Bleak House, which was published 1853, and can be seen to be one of the greatest book openings ever. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to translate it into modern English, sentence by sentence. I guess you’re allowed a dictionary if you want one. Hey, go wild! You’re even allowed your phone.

Off you pop.

“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”

Fun that, wasn’t it?

Now, the reason for doing that is that, between January and April in 2015, researchers at a couple of Kansas universities ran a version of this game with a bunch of English majors. And it’s pretty important you understand that this wasn’t with a bunch of randoms off the street. This was with ENGLISH MAJORS. You know, guys and gals who’d chosen, of their own free will and presumably not under any imminent threat of violent harm, to spend four years of their lives (and a colossal sum of money) on studying books.

The results of this study were published in 2024 under a title that has my ideal level of snark. ‘They Don’t Read Very Well’. Well, quite.

The subjects were sorted into three bands. 5% of them (so only four students) had a ‘good’ understanding of what Dickens was getting at. Go them! 38% were judged to have a ‘competent’ appreciation, basically they got the gist of the thing. And the rest of them - 58%!!! - of ENGLISH MAJORS were judged to be ‘problematic’ readers, who “understood so little of the introduction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.”

I mean... ouch.

These ENGLISH MAJORS (am I belabouring the point?) were such poor readers that they couldn’t, with any reliability at all, tell when Dickens was being literal and when he was being figurative. The megalosaurus caused genuine trouble. And so did the concept of fog.

But what’s truly chef’s kiss about this whole thing is that those 58% still “believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.” Sure. These guys couldn’t read, but their self-confidence was immaculate. Mr Dunning and Mr Kruger would like an urgent meeting.

Although… actually, no. The real cherry on the cake here is surely that nearly half of those ENGLISH MAJORS were ENGLISH EDUCATION MAJORS. As in, they were already well on their way to becoming English teachers. That means that many of those who didn’t have the mental wherewithal to realise Dickens didn’t actually describe a literal dinosaur walking through Central London are, as you read these words, most likely somewhere in the American Midwest, explaining Great Expectations to impressionable minds.

It appears that nobody ever taught these kids how to read critcally across twelve years of public schooling and a number of semesters of an English degree. But someone certainly made them feel all good and confident about themselves. Which is lovely, but... you know. (Worth noting, too, that this data was collected in 2015, so whatever went wrong here went wrong comfortably before anyone could blame it on TikTok.)

But this literacy failure is absolutely not the fault of these 85 students. It’s down to countless members of faculty who needed to spend less time on making them feel good about themselves and far less assuming students can learn to read complex texts on their own. Comprehension of hard prose is NOT a personality trait. It’s a trained skill.

Funnily enough, the part of the study nobody ever quotes is the part I’d happily tattoo on foreheads. The remedy for these students wasn’t remedial worksheets or simple despair. It was to have somebody actually reading the difficult stuff with them, helping them to overcome the hard bits. Weird that, eh?

Anyway, that’s my rant for the week. The megalosaurus is figurative and it didn’t come up Holborn Hill. But only 4 out of 85 people with English degrees can tell you that, so make sure you check your sources.

Sources

Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana and Diane Miniel, ‘They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities’, CEA Critic, 86.1 (2024), 25–43.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), opening paragraph.

And my earlier piece on the Atlantic essay that leans on this study: ‘The Age of Reading Isn’t Over. It’s Just Not Happening to Everyone.’