>Among those 602 people, the average correct score was slightly lower at 5.76.
>A total of 76 people at top universities, including Oxbridge and the Ivy League, took part and fared little better.
LMAO, I knew it, Dickens is utter shit and everybody knows it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297869/
>>8090597
>602 people
That's not a sufficient sample size and really only enough to write a clickbait article about, nothing more.
Dickens is shit though
>>8090597
Dickens is famous for being a shit prose stylist. Retarded test.
>>8090597
>plebs fail to recognize the difference between a pleb work and a great author
Colour me surprised
And yes "prestigious" Uni students are still plebs
How is Lytton the worst writer of all time? There are many other terrible writers.
>>8090597
Dickens is largely known for his intricate story telling, not his prose. And the test only had them pick if a passage was Dickens or the other guy, not make any sort of value judgement on the quality of the writing.
>>8090607
>In a university experiment, more than 9,000 people worldwide were presented with a dozen passages from the novels of the two Victorian authors.
open the link friendo
>>8090616
>"prestigious" in quotes
Go back to state school, sport.
>>8090616
>He doesn't go to Princeton
Two bestselling authors of the same nationality and who were exact contemporaries wrote in a similar way? You don't say.
>>8090597
>dailymail
>doesn't provide mirror
>doesn't provide the test for us to take
someone give me the test.
Can /lit/ tell the difference between genius and hack?
http://reverent.org/art_or_hack.html
>>8090753
http://reverent.org/bulwer-dickens.html
>>8090753
Yeah, people here should start using archive.is for all news site links (all of them)
>>8090753
>A mirror
Are you a Rotherham rapist? The daily mail is the only paper with the balls to report the awful shit going on in the UK
>>8090756
>Your score is 67%
I got bored at the end and got the last 3 wrong.
>>8090769
I also got 67%
That's pretty decent, especially since I'm drunk
>>8090786
King at times writes decent paragraphs.
It's also pretty silly judging on just one instead of a larger body since the words carry more meaning in more cohesive chapters than out of context.
I've also never read king and didn't read Joyce in the original.
>>8090756
>58%
neat though I have never read dickens or bulwer. I'm betting the results would be much different if respondents were obligated to have read both authors before responding.
Here's the explanation:
You're all stupid enough to think that it's a poetic style that differentiates between great and bad writers, and not only that, but that great writers can keep up a poetic style constantly and any line taken out of context from their works should be great. This is blatantly wrong, because there is a flow not just in the individual placement of words in a sentence, but in the placement of sentences in a paragraph, paragraphs on a page. There is the forward flow of character development, of themes, of plot to consider. Lines that taken out of context read quite badly actually aren't that bad while you're reading them because you're too caught up in the full import of the book, all the characterization and theme and plot, to realize that this individual sentence isn't amazing.
> It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.
Is this pretentious and artificial out of context? Absolutely; but that's because all truly great literary art is pretense and artifice, is the deliberate choice to attempt to write poetically instead of how people naturally talk like (unless you're Gaddis); accepting the very style the narrative is written is is like a suspension of disbelief, one that you have to accept throughout the story, and which makes you pass over in silence what otherwise you would snort at as pretension.
>>8090798
Not only that, but prose can very well be functional instead of poetic, even for the best of writers; in the heat of writing, you don't have time to consider how beautiful the sentence is at times, you just want to drive forward the motion of the story.
>>8090803
Breh, we've all read Dickens and we know he's shit
>>8090798
You have no idea what you are talking about. Kill yourself.
>>8090811
Writers can't be expected to maintain a constant degree of genius, even Shakespeare nods; however, passages like these are what ensure their literary immortality at least:
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine,—who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
Anyway, I'm not going to argue about Charles Dickens, because even I myself am not too fond of his writings. It's the general point about style-worship on /lit/. Style isn't the only thing an author can have; just look at Dostoyevsky and Balzac, who are both said to read better stylistically in translation than in their own languages.
>>8090845
He1l H1tler
>>8090635
Most of them also post on /lit/.
>>8090756
>Joyce vs. King
>Only got 83%
I'm so ashamed.
>>8090756
Is this test broken? I got 25% because it literally alway claims that I chose the opposite of what I had actually chosen.
>>8090756
I got 83% almost without thinking, you're pretty pleb if you get under 70%
>>8090864
Fuck that news site. I think I lost a couple of IQ points after I read the article. This garbage could pass for a greentext if you added > at the beginning of each paragraph.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton isn't remarkably bad, he just wrote a bunch of memes is all.
>>8090597
Dickens was a good storyteller, not a god writer. Even critics disliked him at the time. He got paid by the word, so many of his novels such as Great Expectations are overwritten. That said, his books are still great stories thematically.
>>8090864
I was deeply aghast at this fowl comment. The pain was as if I landed gooch first onto a rail after botching a major grid.
>>8090597
>quantitative sociology of literature
>>8091211
>He got paid by the word
>believing in the "paid by the word" meme
>>8090756
Got 75%. Pretty easy to tell by the complexity of the sentences and the vocabulary which is meant for a mass reader and which a mass reader wouldn't tolerate.
>>8090597
Dumb. Pretty clear that the selected Dickens excerpts all fit into what we understand today as cliche and are there just to trick the respondents into thinking it can't be the revered Dickens.
Also, my black supervisor from Newark always "this shit is more boring than the Dickens." Is this a common phrase among the African Community that I was never aware of or is this something that she or someone close to her may have created?
>>8091199
I know nothing about this man. Was he just the Victorian John Green? I'm sure there were writers way worse than this guy out there.
>>8091831
he's the guy who invented "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "it was a dark and stormy night"
>>8090756
100% Joyce, 42% Dickens
Proof of Joyce's quality imo.
>>8092015
Wow, I got 42% on Joyce.
>I'm retarded?!
>>8091827
Let me google that for you, friend.
"This is one of several phrases using dickens as a euphemism for devil such as what the dickens, where the dickens, the dickens you are, etc. Since its use can be traced back to Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, it has nothing to do with Charles Dickens."
83% on Joyce, I got numbers 5 and 6 wrong.
>>8090597
Dickens is pretty shit desu, I heard that he just crammed as many words as he could in A Tale of Two Cities bc he was being payed by the word
>>8090756
83%, not even a native English speaker so I guess it's not that bad
>>8090756
75% for Joyce vs. King
67% for Dickens vs. Bulwer-Lytton
>>8090756
lol, got 83% on the joyce vs king one.
funny how they only used pieces of a portrait of a young man from joyce, as if they were too pleb to read his other works.
>>8090756
92%
only got this bit wrong:
"I believe with Moses, with Jereboam, with Increase Mather, and with our own Hanson (when he is in a philosophical temperament), that there are spiritually noxious places, buildings were the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.
Stephen King, "Jerusalem's lot"
2. Right answer: commercial writer Your answer: great writer"
non-native English
>>8093214
>the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid
gave it away for me
>>8092015
>comparing an early 20th century pervert to an excellent horror writer
>proof of joyce's greatness.
Pretentiousness rather.
>>8090811
>/lit/
>reading
>dickens
Ha
>>8090637
Fucking this
There are two elements to fiction: narrative and prose. Dickenson excelled at the narrative, and his prose was average at the time. As popular thought has advanced, his prose has become far more dated and stereotypical, according to modern thought
>>8090756
>75% joyce
Not a native english speaker but I still feel so ashamed. I am sorry joyce I've betrayed you
>>8093468
>There are two elements to fiction: narrative and prose.
There are more than that.
>Dickenson excelled at the narrative,
You mean Dickens?
>and his prose was average at the time.
If by "average" you mean "utter shit".
>As popular thought has advanced, his prose has become far more dated and stereotypical, according to modern thought
"As popular thought has advanced"? What on earth are you talking about? Dickens was known in 1850 to be a shit prose stylist, and he is known in 2016 to be a shit prose stylist (at least among non-retards). And Thackeray will always be a god-tier prose stylist. It's not that complicated.
>>8090845
dosty is shit on english
