randomwisdom.com

via Slashdot:
Let's just rewrite Shakespeare

What happens when you remove all the inherent beauty from a work of art? You get feces.

This misses the mark in so many ways it's disgusting. First of all, the point of studying classics isn't for the plot, it's for the expressive language and witty dialogue. If you summarize a classic novel you've just wrung everything witty and interesting out of it. All that clever dialogue, all the puns, all the descriptive language, GONE. The real problem, which they're missing completely, is trying to study Shakespeare by reading a script. That makes about as much sense as developing an appreciation for classical music by reading musical scores. (Along the same lines, it makes as much sense as studying English by writing example sentences ten times each, but that's a different post altogether.) Your students can't understand the written text? Take them to a modern performance. Have them listen to the language. Explain where necessary, and even summarize in conjunction with reading the text, but do it in English!

The article's "summaries" are doubly bad; not only are they removing everything interesting by summarizing, but they're actively encouraging bad writing and grammar in the process. Good grief.