Daniel Brent Patton

Product Content Strategy & UX Writing

John Kilgore of Eastern Illinois University writes in The Vocabula Review (subscription required) of the aversion many students have of sitting in a classroom reviewing works of poetry, and the equally potent aversion teachers have to presiding over same. One salient point:

English poetry reports in from every point of the compass and from eight different centuries, and it is simply to be expected that any given reader will have trouble making basic sense of much of it. Johnny performs dismally as a reader of sonnets, but how would Shakespeare fare with a rap CD or a Nintendo game?

Now for those of you who wish to place the Bard on a higher plane than Busta Rhymes and Sonic the Hedgehog, that is your right (and admittedly my first inclination as well). But on reflection, which truly helps us make sense of this world? Indeed I’m a product of this day. Perhaps my literature background gives me an expanded view of the world. Were it in math, perhaps I’d see equations everywhere…