If anyone can answer what the 'correct' interpretation of a piece of writing is, it's the author. If they can not, well maybe the authors intent wasn't what the questions are asking.

Of course this is a fundamental problem in the way we teach and test literature. No piece of work has a single meaning because meaning is found in the merging of the work and the viewers background. What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.

To echo the other comments questioning that premise, there's also the famous Isaac Asimov anecdote:

Isaac Asimov often repeated an anecdote based on this: He once sat in on a class where the topic of discussion was one of his own works. (He did this in the back of a large lecture hall so he could remain semi-anonymous). After the class ended, he went up and introduced himself to the teacher, saying that he had found the teacher's interpretation of the story interesting, though it really wasn't what he had meant at all. The teacher's response: "Just because you wrote it, what makes you think you have the slightest idea what it's about?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent#New_Criticism

i took a shakespeare course at university where we were asked to read troilus and cressida and compare it to its source troilus and criseyde by chaucer

i wrote that i disliked the piece because it just read like someone who recently got burned in love venting irrationally, noting that i liked shakespeare's version more because he gives the last word to pandarus(o) who uses it to comically complain about his health and i felt this beautifully subverted the assumed tragedy the characters felt subject to in their stories.. woe is me!

i failed the exam

frustrated i went looking for evidence to defend my claim(i).. though contrary to the linked comic i did find some interesting notes

first off chaucer was a source for shakespeare, but hardly the source of the work

chaucer's main source was boccaccio's il filastrato.. which was based off an earlier version known as le roman de troie by benoît de sainte-maure

but the interesting bit comes from boccaccio's version(ii) because the story itself is only 8 cantos long, even the wikipedia page says the work itself is only 8 cantos long!(iii), but there is an additional canto, a ninth canto, wherein the author, boccaccio, addresses the reader and apologises for writing the poem and states he's unsure where it came from but asserts that he was recently dumped

(o) http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/full.html

(i) https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/06

(i/2) https://store.penny-arcade.com/products/agree-with-me-tee

(ii) http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/filostrato_griffin.pdf

(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Filostrato

front page of reddit right now.. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i... ;P

the course was set up that we would read a work and then write a one page response in class

here is where i voiced my distaste for chaucer 'creating', as was presented to our class, this story while appreciating shakey's subversion of the material

this garnered the 'f' for my opinions about love forlorned

then at the end of each four week period we would, in lieu of exams, choose one work to 'dive deeper on' and write a longer piece

i chose triolus because it was the one piece i got such a low score on

while 'going deeper' i ended up finding, and reading, bocaccio and sainte-maure and wrote about how all four are similar and different and how these comparisons related to my original, correct ;P, intuition

i got a 'd' with complaints to the effects of 'stick to the course material' and 'just drop it'

i think my axe grinding became the professor's honing stone, which is unfortunate that such a circumstance can occur in an as advertised educational environment

Capitalization and punctuation shouldn't be your signals for quality in a comment on Chaucer and Shakespeare and literary history.

I'm demonstrating one natural outcome of your criticism here by using proper punctuation, capitalization, and other grammatical minutiae while knowing not the damnedest thing about the quality or literary history of Troilus and Cressida.

Note that I used the word "choice," indicating that I understood it to be a conscious decision rather than a lack of competence.

> Capitalization and punctuation shouldn't be your signals for quality in a comment on Chaucer and Shakespeare and literary history.

What makes you think I used them as exclusive signals? My claim wasn't that bad grammar made the parent post bad, it was that bad grammar had a negative contribution towards the overall credibility of the post.

> I'm demonstrating one natural outcome of your criticism...

Your reading comprehension might leave something to be desired, but the fact that a weak building may be built on a strong foundation does not imply that a strong building may have a weak foundation. To be clear: I am referring to your "example," not justifier's post, because I do not believe that justifier has a weak foundation, at least not with respect to grammar, which brings us back to the question of why.

Purposefully employing bad grammar in a post about English is a signal both that the writer holds strong and nontraditional opinions about English and that (s)he lacks the persuasive tact to fight one battle at a time. The way I see it, either quality alone could have led to a justified failing grade on an essay for reasons that have nothing to do with the veracity of its core claim.

You're essentially bikeshedding [1] here. 'justifier' wrote an interesting comment that had some actual substance to it, and now you and I are engaged here in a pissing match over the value of its grammar and punctuation, and we're doing that because neither of us is well-enough educated on the actual topic of 'justifier's comment to respond substantively to it but yet we both want to express an opinion about it.

It's an ugly, ugly habit that I see a lot in HN comments, whether it's in reply to a long-form essay or in reply to a newly announced startup or a new programming language. It discourages comments and participation from more thoughtful people because they can expect whatever they write to get henpecked by other people who, having no mastery of the actual subject matter, turn instead to the most trivial-to-understand bits and pieces.

I picked on you at random to try to discourage that behavior a little. And since I'm contributing to that problem now myself, this'll be my last word about it today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

> Purposefully employing bad grammar in a post about English

If this post was about English, everything said in English is about English. The post was explicitly about meaning.

They're calling into question the driving ability of a self-professed race car driver, who seems to be struggling with the basics of driving.

The writing was so clear that I didn't even notice the lack of punctuation until it was pointed out.

i also avoid negative constructions.. look through my comment history

you will find it is completely devoid, except now for this comment, of any instances of using: no, not, never, none

do you think plato lacks credibility? have you ever read classics(o) in their original languages? theywereflippantinevenusingspacesbetweenwords(i)

i would ask that if you care to develop an opinion as to my credibility that it be based on my content rather than if i can correctly utilise a ruleset someone else created that i disagree with

but i can respect that some people are unwilling to do so

(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics

(i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

I also, by and large, avoid capitals when I feel that doing so will not distract - usually that's in chats, notes, and git commit messages - but what you're doing is much bigger than that. It's like, I don't know, vegetarianism for language. It's fascinating. I have so many questions.

What is your full ruleset, if you have it handy? Is this just a HN thing? A social media thing? An online thing? An all the time thing? Do you make exceptions for whatever kind of formal writing you might need to do (research papers, grant proposals, cover letters, posters, etc.)? Are you in STEM, and if not, what is your field? When did you start writing like this? I'm already imagining some vivid clashes with teachers/professors if you started anywhere in undergrad or below.

> What is your full ruleset, if you have it handy?

ha! this is a funny question.. when i first started doing this i wrote a note taking app that took in a ruleset and ensured you followed it.. i'm unable to find the code right now otherwise i could just drop in the json ;P

inevitably i'll forget something, but here are some highlights: remove negatives, remove absolutes and bias identifying markers when used unnecessarily, write timelessly, lists follow ':' and end with ';', parenthetical ideas are separated by a two dot '..' ellipsis, group ideas by comma ended groups where the last line is without punctuation.. with the exception of '?|!'.. then followed by a newline;

   hn has its own opinions about formatting,
   so this last rule is one i am unable to do on here,
   but i try to compromise as much as i can
   
   this has often gotten me in trouble on hn,
   because people get offended by all of the whitespace separating my individual lines
   
   for a while i wrote exclusively in these 'code blocks',
   but i felt the scrolling was too annoying,
   and got in the way of the messaging

to the best of my abilities it is an all the time thing.. it started as a writing thing: digital communications, journals, poetry; but then i decided to do it while speaking too

the extemporaneous aspect of speaking makes it more difficult but i find my ability to communicate clearly and in a way i feel i can be proud of is greatly improved

sometimes i am unable to find an alternative to a negative and will ask the person i am talking to to help me construct the sentence without the negative.. it's also funny when i let one slip and someone close to me calls me out on my shit and we try to reconstruct the sentence together

> Do you make exceptions for whatever kind of formal writing you might need to do (research papers, grant proposals, cover letters, posters, etc.)?

yes, certainly

i do what i can to always stay true, regardless of audience, to the content rules: negatives, absolutes, bias; but in regard to formatting i try to 'play to my audience'

when that audience is such that hypothetically i could be the one consuming my own creations: online, poetry, etc; then i use my writing style as an outlet for expression

> Are you in STEM, and if not, what is your field?

i also eschew limiting oneself to a single field, but i do involve myself in many different fields and stem are definitely some such fields

i do research in number theory, study physics and chemistry, program, do ee, write, produce visual media, play music, study health

my diversifying principle is that if i see someone doing something i greatly respect then i want to do so myself as well.. for instance, i am a huge fan of filippo brunelleschi so i designed my own dome.. i named it the domb, for dumb dome

i had to learn cad and architectural principles and also ended up developing an interesting result in euclidian geometry by working on this dome project

> When did you start writing like this? I'm already imagining some vivid clashes with teachers/professors if you started anywhere in undergrad or below.

it happened after an argument i had with a loved one over an instant messenger app

afterward, this person printed the entire thread and mailed it to me

it was a pretty intense experience, reading that argument.. especially considering when i wrote the words i was thinking they were ephemeral.. in so doing, i noticed some things about myself

first off, though i assumed the conversation was ephemeral the reality was that though the bytes indeed disappeared my words lived on in the relationship i was building with this person

in addition to wanting to nurture the relationships i am in now i also am a lover of literature and those that produce it, and as such have read many journals by writers and i just decided at that point that i wanted to only write things that i wanted a person like me in the future reading from me in some hypothetical collection of my writings

the other thing i noticed was that my best ideas were killed by my simply negating the other person.. an overly simple example: 'do you want to spend time together tonight?' 'no'vs'tonight i'm busy but what about tomorrow'

my intended message was being nullified, or mired in anger, by a lazy and impulsive reply

so this is when i started removing negative constructions from my language, from there i felt a freedom to restrict my language patterns in other ways to better match my thought patterns and help nurture my intended reception

>it's also funny when i let one slip and someone close to me calls me out on my shit and we try to reconstruct the sentence together

Hahahaha, that's really cute.

but seriously, is that how you want to judge? and how you think people should be judged?

am i the crusader? i am just writing how i like to write, and instead of engaging with the material people question how i present my opinion?

if i were commenting on every comment: why are you using this tired grammatical dogma that is ill suited for the immediacy of our main contemporary publishing platform; then i could agree with your sentiment, but instead this effort to uphold an assumed status quo seems the real crusade here

i am sorry my punctuation offends you, i wish there was a way that i could write how i want to write and you could read it how you want to read it

Heh! Maybe they could peruse http://wiki.languagetool.org/adding-a-new-language

or they might as well had to use some crappy inconvenient input method, like a sensor keyboard, which makes you want to minimize keystrokes.

Anyway, I'd also like to know the answer, I just wouldn't add that part about credibility.

I think grading matrixes would be well served it they assess the writing ability of the person. That is, how well can they justify their opinion with quotes and sources, rather than what the interpretation outcome itself.

the bigger issue was that this interaction negatively affected my relationship with the professor.. who was unaware of il filastrato as a source for chaucer?!, and unimpressed that i read two supplemental works that were beyond the scope of the course syllabus

also frustratingly tainted my association with shakespeare since whenever someone talks about academic shakespeare i immediately want to monologue

edit: Someone else linked to it in the comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard

"Shakespeare in school" https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5mr6ws/shakespeare_i...

The background story seems to be this half-hour video "Cunk on Shakespeare": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YeCpHoy9EQ

This is the crux of the matter. James Joyce (just to pick someone whose work is heavily discussed) may have made a reference to a common Catholic belief and not realized it because he was embedded in Irish Catholicism. It could have made some metaphor stronger or weaker. When you discuss the metaphor you may be discussing the author's unwitting intent. Thus the author themselves might not be the proper authority (except for their own overt motivations).

Literature isn't special in this regard -- after all we go to psychiatrists & therapists to help us learn about our own actions that we don't understand.

Having Googled the original poem, there's really only one place you could split it into two stanzas, which coincides with repetition of phrases from the first stanza - the only repetition in the poem - and which is where the poem switches from thinking about Monday to it being Sunday at midnight. I don't think the author put the pause there purely to save her breath...

(you can read the original poem - typeset without the stanzas - and the original questionable high school questions here http://www.jiskha.com/display.cgi?id=1394137792)

It's also worth noting that even if the assumed authorial intent is completely wrong (like many other theories of authorial intent attributed to authors who usually aren't around to question it), it's a far more reasonable interpretation than the other multiple choice answers. Though this doesn't really apply to some of the other examples

Well, that's very much up for debate. The Intentional Fallacy claims that authorial intent is not a valid part of artistic criticism or interpretation. That all you can judge a work on is the internal text and surrounding body of context, not notions of what was going on in the artist's head.

The idea is debated, to be sure.

I guess what I'm saying is poetry runs on the client?

But, it lets people avoid criticism making it a popular standpoint.

It doesn't assume that. It doesn't matter whether the text does or does not have inherent meaning. The essay's point is that the reader's judgement is just as valid as the writer's.

As an extreme example, the phrase "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"[1] can be interpreted by the reader as having meaning even though Noam Chomsky says it's a meaningless sentence. The author is not the final and not the only interpretation that's valid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...

Now, that does not mean the Author is infallible. But, discounting the authors intend is like ignoring a books sequels or even the second half of the text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCeFbK-WEVE

In the end by discounting the author you are left with the lowest form of criticism, how did that make me feel. Which is not actually about the text, just the person writing.

Getting back to your phrase. Someone can assume line noise has meaning, but they are simply mistaken.

Ignoring the author's culture includes their language. Consider handing just that text to an alien along side a few thousand similar, but randomly generated texts.

I'm just saying the main context I'm seeing here is goalpost moving.

The written word is a medium of exchange not an independent artifact. If you read a recipe with "Add 3 cups of water." the author's intent is to tell you how to make something edible. So, it means poor 3 cups of water not take three 1 cup containers with water and add the containers and water to the mixture.

You can find examples like this in any lengthy text. But, death of the author is not about exploring that kind of grammatical wordplay it's about shielding the critic from reality. Thus, intent is both considered and ignored when it helps them.

But it's not. The question isn't "what does this mean to YOU", but "what did this mean to the author".

If I pick words randomly I can say with authority that there is no meaning in the words, and for all your understandings you can't change that the words were picked blindly, and thus without meaning.

> The author is not the final and not the only interpretation that's valid.

As to the author's intent, yes it is. Whatever intent there was is set down with the ink on paper. You come later, as a reader, so your interpretation is at most an addendum and not part of the original.

> [...] can be interpreted by the reader as having meaning even though Noam Chomsky says it's a meaningless sentence.

Sure. But an interpretation isn't a change in the nature of the actual thing. Even if I interpret an elephant as a butterfly it won't fly away.

This entire literary "discipline" (cough) is based on refusing to use an accurate description of the practice. Everyone agrees that a text can invoke various things - even unintended things - in various readers. That doesn't mean you're finding something inherent in the text but in the reader.

Why is that?

There are a myriad of ways to analyze a piece, and many focus on reader response rather than authorial intent. You can dismiss reader response as merely incorrect initially, but this becomes complicated when you try to analyze works written by reader response critics. Indeed some authors like Burroughs take this to the extreme, introducing randomness (via cut-up technique) to their writing in an attempt to eschew even the possibility of authorial intent. Burroughs was somewhat limited in his approach by the technology of his day, but it's not hard to imagine approaches using modern technology which remove an author from the system completely.

I am not saying I agree that reader response criticism entirely: just because authorial intent isn't special doesn't mean that reader response is the answer. Frequently reader response is used as a way for critics to use a piece of literature as a soapbox for their own ideologies, and I find that distasteful. But I do think that there's some validity to the idea that authors don't have any special authority to interpret their own work.

For example, look at the song "I'll be watching you". Sting had said that he intended this song to be about government surveillance. But almost universally this song has been (mis?)interpreted as being about a stalker. Any analysis of the song which focused solely on Sting's intent would be incomplete, because the interpretation of the consumers of the song is far more related to its cultural relevance.

> What we teach is that works have one correct interpretation and if you do not read it that way, you are wrong.

That's not my experience. At least in my school days, in Germany, it wasn't common to only accept one interpretation as correct. As long as we could reasonably justify and explain our interpretations we were fine.

I thought the entire poem was sexual -- singular tree being a euphamism for a phallus, and the waves of the sea reverberations of an orgasm. I was given an F and sent to the principal's office. It was then and there that I decided that math was more my thing.

QuercusMax objects in sister comment to interpreting "singuliers" as "only one".. The line "Des arbres singuliers" clearly indicates to me that there are many trees, regardless of whether their "singularity" means they are all "remarkable, unique" or "free-standing, isolated" (which, the more I read it, the more I understand the basis of your interpretation).

In any case, to be accurate, I think your interpretation needed to be compatible with there being many phalluses. (Phalli?) :)

my freshman year of high school i had a project where i had to write some kind of collection of poems. i ended up putting together a calendar, with certain days having a poem. there was some kind of rationale to how i picked the days, but i can't remember. i had an error printing it though, and i couldn't get the last two months to print, but i had met my requirements for the project, so i just turned it in.

this brought me a very long and irritating discussion with two counselors and the vice principal. they thought: maybe i was gay, maybe i was trans, maybe i had been molested, maybe i was being abused, maybe was planning something violent, maybe the whole thing was a big joke, and maybe i was planning to commit suicide. they wanted an explanation, and all i could say was that i was just... writing some poems shrugs.

Of course, who in their right mind would expect that French literature would be a nice safe area of study that doesn't rock the boat of American sexual mores, haha. (I assume this all happened in the US?)

Like, what is the isle then? Yourself?

As an artist myself, I have a huge problem with assessing qualitative analysis using something as mechanical as multiple choice. Authorial intent definitely falls under that umbrella. Rigid assessments would better show the students' ability to recognize the mechanics/techniques of a piece, such as the use of metaphor. And in general, you're really not supposed to speculate about authorial intent anyway.

The university that I attended was going through a power struggle at the time that resulted in a feminist takeover of the English and other departments. In my case, a professor in a course required by the general education requirements took issue with an essay I was required to read in front of the class (which was a story about my families experiences as immigrants), shouted me down and said that I would fail the class and there was nothing that I could do to change that. That was putting my major's GPA requirements at risk, so I had to pursue action with the administration. That wasn't an uncommon event.

My takeaway is to STFU around these topics.

On top of that, poems are meant to be "artsy". I.e. They specifically use certain words in odd ways as part of the artistry of it. It's actually a step in the opposite direction of what "engineering types" would want to do to language in order to make it less ambiguous.

My solution to that was I never took another humanities class.

Eventually I concluded the same thing - that the purpose of the class is not to have me actually think, form opinions, structure arguments and express them - despite what they kept telling us! - but rather to find out what the established interpretation is, and express that in a way that looks like I'm convinced by it. Armed with that knowledge, I proceeded with future essays, and what do you know? They were all As.

That whole experience really soured me up on that business, though, because whatever I was submitting for my assignments, I knew it was all bullshit from my perspective. And you know what? In retrospect, some of my opinions I strongly held then may well have been wrong in part or entirely... but they were my thoughts and my opinions, the real thing, and backed by real arguments. And if I were that 15 year old kid, with the experiences and the mindset formed by them that I had, not a single thing would have changed about them.

So, instead of teaching how to think and argue and express myself, they taught me that you conform to what someone else expects from you, and hide your deviations; or else.

It's a good thing they weren't the only teachers...

But that experience definitely steered me away from humanities, and towards math and sciences. There, at least, there was clear right and wrong, and any occasional ambiguity would be clearly highlighted as such and acknowledged by everyone explicitly. And if you were right, you could be as obstinate as you wanted about it; and if you were wrong, you'd be shown a very clear and objective reason as to why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

Sure, but only to the extent that phrasing around "interpreting text" implies that the meaning sought exists in the text, rather than the cascade reactions taking place in readers upon their careful observation of the piece.

With individual assessment there's far too much room for "I know what you meant" to sneak in. This has come up a lot with job interviews; if you want to interview impartialy, have a fixed bank of questions and grade answers to a rubric.

I think it depends on the subject matter, especially interpretation of art is hard to have one correct answer, an essay test could be graded upon support for the argument etc, where a multiple choice test is really "what did the authors of the test think the author intended?"

If anything, the stereotype is that engineers are overly prone to answer-seeking while non-engineers are much more comfortable with relativism?

If the skill of interpreting a poem is useless (I don't think it is), it doesn't matter which poems are used in the lessons.

Learning your first programming language is a challenge, but once you have done that, subsequent languages are easier because you managed to adopt the programming mindset.

Alternatively, the 68HC11 is a very simple architecture, making it easy to learn the essence of assembly. Using an architecture with more capabilities will be easier than learning to do without. (although cycle counting on an architecture with memory latency is much harder)

   it could be better that you learn a commercially
   dead language first.

Because it's a simpler language that contains the key ideas and skills that are trying to be taught, and doesn't contain other distracting details that can't be taught until after basic concepts are well-understood.

Same reason lots of people don't like using Java as an intro language even though it's wildly popular. Having students type "public static void main..." a hundred times a semester before knowing enough to be able to understand what "public", "static", or even "void" mean is at best distracting. At worst, it teaches students to use programming languages in highly unprincipled ways.

1. Learning a simple assembly makes learning a second assembly easier

2. Therefore, it's more efficient to learn a simple assembly first

The 2nd statement does not directly follow from the first, because the total time to learn two languages can still be greater than the time to learn the 2nd language alone, even if there is a synergistic effect. I'm assuming here that the simple assembly is not useful, and the goal is purely to learn the 2nd language.

Like, let's say learning a simple assembly makes learning the second language 35% easier. Then learning both languages is better only if the second language would normally take 3x more time to learn.

However, if every subsequent language is also easier to learn, and you intend to learn many more languages, then maybe starting from a simple language will actually be best.

Talking about x86 in particular, it's pretty easy to define a simple, teachable subset of x86 and then expand from there.

The conjecture is that using a simpler language makes it easier to teach the basic concepts, and that more advances features get in the way of teaching those basic concepts.

I'm not saying this is true, just that it's a reasonable hypothesis.

Learning a simple assembly may making learning a second assembly easier, but that's beside the point -- you need the basic concepts before any of the advanced/more complicated features become useful. And if the more advanced language gets in the way of learning the basic concepts, that could justify using a simpler language.

This is a hotly contested topic in CS education research, and we're not going to come to a consensus here.

How do you know that the choice of first assembly language is less important, particularly if you are forgoing the opportunity to learn one that embodies more of what we have learned about how to design them?

"Abroad"?

I'm pretty sure you'll find countries that are not the US that do it much better. I'm willing to countenance that there are countries that are not the US that do it worse.

What you (should) get judged on is the technique used. Does it look like a cat, are the shadows properly drawn, are the proportions of the cat in order, does the cat look like it's thinking like a human would, etc.

What is irrelevant is if that cat matches the image the teacher had in mind when she came up with the task.

So I taught them how to do it.

Now, the questions I often ask myself is - Would it have been better to let my students fail the entrance exam, knowing that English would not be required in their major? Keeping that in mind, was it wrong for the test writer to write a test that favoured clever application of technique over English knowledge? What were they selecting for and what was the best way to determine it? Why is English even on the entrance exam?

Similarly, why would anyone have a test about poetry on a standardised exam if their intent was not simply to discover how well the students could jump through hoops?

When a work is said to be open to interpretation, it means that the author has their expressed opinion, but that it may also suggest other things about the author that they are not willing to admit about themselves.

For example, no interpretation of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" will draw the conclusion that Card is a fan of Jurassic Park, or that he takes his tea with three sugars, or any such thing. There's just no evidence in the work to suggest one way or the other. But you could take his assertion that the book is about camaraderie and the struggle of good versus evil at face value, or you could take the themes of preemptive, hyperviolence he uses to read between the lines and realize that Orson Scott Card is actually a fascist neoconservative.

That's what "open to interpretation" means. A particular work does not exist separate from the person who created it, and people are not reliable narrators on their motivations.

Of course not. But the fact she doesn't (or, to put it another way, the fact that she does and the right answer is not among the listed options) highlights the absurdity of the question.

As a result, if you take the questions as part of a meta test, you can make some assumptions about answers that are "too easy" and instead choose one which is more correct (because high scorers tend to use it). That often means that correctly used, obscure but field relevant, vocabulary is actually the right (highest scoring) answer choice.

It seems to me that there are two ways this can go, neither of them good:

1. The education board's interpretation effectively becomes canonical. While I have some appreciation for the idea that the author's view is not the only one that counts, substituting precisely one alternative does not strike me as having any legitimacy.

2. Students are imbued with the idea that any answer is as good as any other, so long as it looks like critical thinking. That does not transfer well to any area where critical thinking has to deal with some form of reality.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Reasoning here is the implications which goes in single direction only: since she doesn't know the answer we can conclude the question is bad; had she known the answer, the question might be good or it might still be bad.

In english class you may discuss, for example, "the sky was rainy and sad stuff was happening, this is the author applying pathetic fallacy". Or, "the lady wore red, and she is the object of desire, so there is a color-idea running through the novel".

The immediate response was "no way the author put that in on purpose!". And a little debate ensues about how authors do often meticulously insert details to keep a thematic thread like that going. Famously, there's a character grid from Catch-22 floating around, that basically lays out the traits and how they were injected throughout the plot-line.

More commonly, though, what we write is imbued with the same biases that psychological studies try to extract. So an author may write a story where every male character speaks in a way that gets interpreted as "in this novel the men represent War". And the author may pipe in to say "I did NOT intend it like that!", and this is fine.

However, it wouldn't really be the end of it. Maybe the author revealed some subconscious opinions. So this is why I've always thought that "reading too much" in english literature was just doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis, where you are the doctor and the patient is the author, and their book their story.

(I'm a bachelor in mech eng and a masters in chem eng and haven't taken english since highschool though. take with handfuls of salt)

edit: A student a while back sent a letter to various authors and asked them if they deliberately inserted symbolism in their work. It's a cool read.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbol...