a good read

This afternoon I read a handful of the last response papers I'm getting from my two classes of Contemporary Moral Issues for the semester. The purpose of the papers is to have my students focus on the main idea the author develops, and to say what they think about that idea. Very frequently, the papers offer unsolicited commentary on the article's style.

My students apply a set of aesthetic criteria to the articles that are a little vague to me. According to these criteria, an article must be "a good read," which has characteristics like being simple, using a limited and familiar vocabulary and simple sentence structure, avoiding ambiguity, and being interesting or amusing. There's nothing necessarily wrong with these standards, even though some of them are totally subjective. Obviously an article has to be intelligible to its audience, and it certainly should make some kind of interesting point. Often, though, my students desire that everything they read be written in a style and at a level that will be immediately transparent to them, and that they will not have to strain to understand. It's "a good read" when it fits all these criteria.

I'm not saying my students don't care, or aren't smart. They try to work through essays that aren't "good reads," even if only because they're required to. They do learn vocabulary. But their judgments of what makes an essay valuable or worthwhile doesn't have as much to do with whether the argument is cogent or whether it presents a perspective or concept that's valuable, as that it be subjectively pleasing in all these ways.