If someone is not a totally fluent reader - that is, if they have to devote their attention to puzzling out what the words actually 1) sound like, and 2) what they literally mean - there is simply no way they can hear those words as part of a naturally spoken phrase.Īnd hearing the author’s voice in turn often depends on the reader’s ability to understand how authors convey emphases through punctuation. One of the things that makes these kinds of humorous tones so difficult to identify is the fact that recognizing them is largely based on understanding the relationship between written and spoken language.Įven more so than other kinds of tones, wry humor and irony are more reliant on the readers’ ability to hear the author’s voice internally, to “feel” where the stresses and emphases occur, where the pitch rises and falls. That’s why they’re hard, and that’s precisely why they’re tested on “hard” questions. On one hand, this is not terribly surprising all of these kinds of humor are, by definition, subtle. The concepts quite literally do not exist for them. The weaker readers, and even some of the stronger ones, are usually not even sure what facetiousness, wry humor, and irreverence are.
When I prod them to think about what’s being said and to read it out loud (more about that later), they usually get it without too much trouble. I think there are a few reasons for this difficulty:Ī lot of the strong readers, the ones who actually know what these things are and can recognize them under normal circumstances, get so incredibly freaked out by the test that it simply doesn’t occur to them that certain parts of passages are intended to be funny. It’s not ha-ha, laugh-out-loud, in-your-face humor it’s adult humor, subtle, wry, dry, irreverent, ironic, and facetious.Īnd I’ve started to notice recently that it’s the one thing that pretty much every single one of my students has trouble with, regardless of how far into the 700s they’re scoring. There is, believe it or not, humor on quite a few Critical Reading passages.
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