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Literature, languages and writing

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Scientific American

MIT researchers have found that lawyers prefer, and better understand, simplified texts, rather than legalese, reports Jesse Greenspan for Scientific American. “The researchers presented 105 U.S. attorneys with contract excerpts written in both “legalese” and plain English and tested their comprehension and recall for each,” explains Greenspan. “While the attorneys outperformed laypeople overall, they still found the legalese contracts harder to grasp than those written in plain English.”

Gizmodo

Researchers at MIT have found that lawyers “have an easier time remembering legal documents written in simple English over those filled with so-called legalese,” reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. “On average, for instance, lawyers scored 45% on a test that asked them to recall documents written in legalese, compared to the average 38% scored by nonlawyers,” explains Cara. “But the lawyers’ score also increased to over 50% when they were given the simplified version.”  

The Boston Globe

Boston Globe reporter Don Aucoin spotlights the virtual MTA Playwrights Lab, an annual festival led by senior lecturer Ken Urban that features “staged readings resulting from collaborations between MIT students and professional theater artists.”

Bloomberg

Writing for Bloomberg, Faye Flam highlights Prof. Alan Lightman’s book “In Praise of Wasting Time.” Flam notes that in the book, Lightman looks “at both psychological studies and life histories of famous scientists and writers, and concluded that taking downtime, or play time, is essential to divergent thinking.”

New York Times

In a New York Times article, Amy Carleton, a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program at MIT, writes about her decision to donate one of her kidneys to her stepfather. “It was his quiet support for all of those years that kept me afloat, even if he often stayed in the background,” Carleton writes. 

Boston Globe

Boston Globe reporter Amy Sutherland speaks with Prof. Sherry Turkle about her love of books and the importance of reading. “If you don’t read you lose the capacity for sustained concentration,” says Turkle. “We need to read long, complicated books so we can make the kind of arguments that take place in those books.”

New York Times

In a piece for The New York Times, Prof. Michel DeGraff and Molly Ruggles write of the need for Haitian students to learn in their native Creole, as opposed to French. “Creole holds the potential to democratize knowledge, and thus liberate the masses from extreme poverty,” DeGraff and Ruggles explain. 

Financial Times

John McDermott of The Financial Times interviews Professor Junot Díaz about his childhood, his career as an author and teaching at MIT.  

NECN

Professors Michel Degraff and Deborah Ancona speak with NECN about MIT’s initiative to support Haiti’s development of science, technology, engineering, and math curricula. Since 2010 the initiative has hosted four workshops and trained more than 100 teachers.