This is the second post in my Reading Critically series. The article that follows is a bit longer than the first (its hard to find articles that are as short as SAT passages), but it is a pretty interesting piece. I will pose the questions below, but first a couple of things to note:
The passage is long, but some parts of it can definitely be skimmed, especially once you get a sense for what the author is trying to say. Again this is one of the advantages of reading critically – once you understand the author’s overall purpose and can get a sense for the function of things in the passage (like the paragraphs) it allows you to really speed up because although you might gloss over some of the details, you will know why those details are there. This is a key skill both on the SAT and in real life (especially college). Once you realize that you should not be reading in order to memorize all of the details (which you wouldn’t be able to do anyway) it allows you to read much more quickly and focus on the big picture.
The other thing to point out with this passage is to pay close attention to the author’s tone. The tone on this passage may be obvious to you or it may not, but the author’s tone is always directly related to his or her overall purpose. Ok, the link is below and questions are below that…
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/millennial-mongers_805310.html?nopager=1
1) What is the author’s overall purpose?
The answer to this question relates directly to question 4 below. Many people would read this and think that it is a passage about the millennial generation. That discussion fills up a lot of space in the passage, but the author is really mounting an attack on what he calls “generational analysts,” people who try to characterize an entire generation as having certain qualities in common.
The passage is difficult because the author uses a lot of sarcasm so at times it may seem like he actually believes the generalizations that are being floated about millennials, but he is actually very critical of the idea that a generation can be characterized by any overarching description.
One of the things that helps a lot is to actually read and think about the title of the article: Millennial Mongers – The crackpot social science of generational analysis. The fact that the author refers to generational analysis as a “crackpot science” gives you a huge heads up in understanding where the passage is going. This is a really important point because it is analogous to reading the “blurb” that precedes all of the medium and long passages on the SAT. That blurb will often give you a really good indication of what the purpose of the passage is, so it is essentially that you always read and consider it before reading the passage.
2) How would you characterize the author’s tone in this passage? And what words or sentences most reveal the author’s tone to you (i.e., what words or sentences help support your view of the author’s tone)?
The author’s tone is definitely negative – he offers a pretty harsh criticism of what he calls “generational analysts.” Again many SAT takers are not used to such negative passages and tend to miss how negative they are when they see them, but such passages definitely do appear on the SAT. But I would go further and say that this passage is not only negative, it is mocking, derisive, and even humorous and sarcastic.
For example at the end of paragraph for, he sort of jokingly and mockingly calls the millennials “Generation Not Nice! At All!” And his comment, “Now that we have the correct application figures—which seem to prove that millennials will dive out a second-story window rather than face a Peace Corps recruiter tapping at the front door—should we continue to call them, as the Times still does, Generation Nice?” is meant to be both humorous and critical. And the entire paragraph that begins with, “It’s never pretty when journalists cross-pollinate with academics” is again meant to be both funny and extremely derisive.
3) In the second paragraph, why does the author put the words “public intellectual” in quotation marks?
This is a very common and difficult type of function question that appears on the SAT. It focuses on the author’s purpose or intention of doing something. So why did the author choose to put “public intellectual” in quotation marks? In this case he is sort of making fun of the term and suggesting that it is of dubious validity. What would it even mean to be a public intellectual? He probably believes that that is how Tanenhaus would describe himself but he is basically mocking the title.
4) In the passage, is the author more concerned with the millennial generation itself or of the work of those, such as Tanenhaus, who make sweeping statements about generations?
This is a key question that some people may find to be very easy and obvious and other people would completely miss. Students who are not used to reading critically and believe that reading non-fiction like this is about “learning” the facts might really miss the point and believe that this is about the millennial generation itself. It is not. The author of the passage is critical of those, such as Tanenhaus, who try to define generations. He believes that it is impossible to generalize and apply characteristics to a generation as a whole and he even suggests that it is silly to try to claim that a particular generation is defined as falling between specific birth years. So the passage is not really about millennials even though he mentions them a lot in the passage. It is aimed at the people who he believes foolishly and almost embarrassingly try to characterize the millennial generation as a whole.
5) What is the purpose of the paragraph that begins, “I read on.” (paragraph 5)? Could you have inferred what the paragraph was going to about (thus allowing you to skim it) and if so, how?
This is a really critical point about the importance of reading actively. The previous paragraph begins to give examples of the varieties of characterizations that have been applied to the millennial generation (and that contrast the view of it being Generation Nice). So when he writes, “I read on,” this suggests that he is going to give more examples of what he has found in his reading on the millennial generation and the wide variety of description that can be found. At that point you can skim that entire paragraph and you will see that the purpose of that paragraph was indeed to just give more examples of the diverse and conflicting ways in which the generation has been characterized. Why does he do that? Well just go back to his overall purpose. He is showing that there is nothing even close to a consensus on how the millennial generation should really be characterized in order to support his point that the whole enterprise of analyzing and describing an entire generation is silly and pointless.
6) What is the purpose of the 6th paragraph (“You thought the stock market collapse of 2008…”)?
Again this paragraph can probably be skimmed because it just continues the theme of the previous paragraph: to show the diverse and conflicting interpretations of the millennial generation.
7) What does the author think of “self-reporting”?
This is another good example of how understanding the big picture and the author’s purpose and opinion help you read more efficiently and understand things that you might otherwise not completely understand. We already know that the author is deeply critical of generational analysis. Well right after he introduces “self-reporting” he states, “It is a staple of generational analysis.” So without even knowing what it is, we already know that he is critical of it. That makes it much easier to understand the description of “self-reporting” that follows since we already have an idea of what the author thinks of it. So when he says, A respondent tends to look pretty good when he describes himself,” that is not a good thing (even though it sounds like it is)!!!
8) What is the purpose of the 3 examples that the author gives in paragraph 14 (“It is a cohort that embraces…….home theater in Scarsdale”)?
The key to this (as with most function questions) is to look at the surrounding lines, especially the ones that precede the text in question. The author suggests in the previous sentence that it is impossible to characterize the millions of people that make up an entire generation (one that he says is “tossed together using nothing more than two arbitrary dates as boundaries”). So the point of the 3 examples is to show just how different 3 people from that generation could be. And again, this is to support the larger point that trying to interpret or characterize an entire generation is absurd.
9) Do you agree with the author’s analysis?
This is an interesting question because the author makes a very strong case for the absolute ridiculousness of trying to characterize an entire generation or even trying to draw the boundary lines of a particular generation, but I must admit that despite all of that I do feel like certain age groups have some similar qualities. Admittedly you can’t draw a line and say anyone born after a certain year is necessarily part of a particular generation and obviously no matter what generalities you point to there are going to be millions of people within that age group who don’t fit that generalization, but there do seem to be characteristics that are common in certain age groups (whether we call them generations or not).
This is obviously my opinion, but the point I want to make is that we don’t need to agree completely (or at all) with an author and part of reading critically is about realizing that when an author states an opinion it is only that: an opinion. We don’t necessarily need to agree with that opinion. What we need to do is consider how the author supports that opinion and then make a decision for ourselves.