
The Lifelong Learning of Lifelong Inmates - fern12
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/why-prison-education-is-about-more-than-lowering-recidivism/531873/?utm_source=atlfb&amp;single_page=true
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Hnrobert42
I really wanted to enjoy the article, but I found the author's diction so
clumsy I couldn't get through more tgan a few paragraphs. It was like he was
trying to hard or something. Bummer.

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aphextron
>It was like he was trying to hard or something.

It feels like most of The Atlantic is going that way. The quality has dropped
significantly with their quantity. When you have such a strict requirement put
on writers to do these long, drawn out pieces, it gets to a point of just
filling out page count like a college essay or something.

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pmoriarty
This article reads just fine to me, and The Atlantic's articles have been some
of the most consistently excellent journalism I've ever read.

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eropple
Yup. This is how you _write_ when you want to be read emotionally: evocative
and clean. This is something to take notes from, not complain about how
unbloggably purple the prose here is (especially when it isn't).

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rndmio
I disagree, this is not clean writing. This reads like someone who swallowed a
thesaurus to pad out their word count, and didn't really understand half the
words they decided to use. Not to mention three number of poorly constructed
sentences. I also couldn't get past the first few paragraphs as it so grated.

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eropple
I mean, we can workshop this if you're going to bring examples, but I'll be
real with you: more often than not the charge of "swallowed a thesaurus" tends
to come from folks who _don 't read all that much_ (and I do mean actually
_read_ , not _read tech blogs_ ). So, put up: what words did the author not
"really understand"?

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danielvf
I agree with both of you. One one hand, the writer does understand the words
they are using and uses them correctly.

On the other hand the author clearly eschews words less than nine characters
in length.

Random grab from middle of article:

"focusing too intently on quantifiable outcomes obscures what the essence of
education, in prison or otherwise, is truly about."

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eropple
In my neck of the woods, that's a reasonable phrase with words that have
particular context to them that their synonyms don't.

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pmoriarty
I'd encourage anyone interested in this subject to read a book called "True
Notebooks" about a writer teaching prisoners in juvenile hall.

