Re: Suggested Change for SC rules
Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 2:53 pm
If I remember correctly, in the original challenge this was a bone of contention. Many members preferred to read online- blogs, magazine type articles, news sites, etc. and "how would these count?". This is what I, and I'm sure I'm not alone, do a lot of in my reading in Spanish and Portuguese instead of reading actual "books". Reading a hundred actual 300 page novels in the timeframe of the SC would be challenging even in one's native language.
The stats provided above by tiia and emk's observations, and as I remember Serpent backing up as well in her observation, seem to support that the lower number of pages is doable and provides the same noticeable boost in ability. I may be wrong here, but I think it would be a good idea to give people a realistic target to achieve rather than a "worthy" one that few would be able to complete. Perhaps a solution could be found in renaming "books" to "reading units" with each reading unit being equivalent to the 50 page definition. In this a way, a standard novel would be worth 6 reading units. 100 reading units would complete the challenge and be the equivalent of reading about 17 standard 300 page novels. This is still challenging for most people to do (especially in L2) and the evidence both empirical and observational seem to suggest that doing this would still give the participants a dramatic boost to their language abilities.
Web pages could be counted by defining a standard page to have x amount of words. These days, I'm sure a web page's words can be counted in some way by a computer.
The stats provided above by tiia and emk's observations, and as I remember Serpent backing up as well in her observation, seem to support that the lower number of pages is doable and provides the same noticeable boost in ability. I may be wrong here, but I think it would be a good idea to give people a realistic target to achieve rather than a "worthy" one that few would be able to complete. Perhaps a solution could be found in renaming "books" to "reading units" with each reading unit being equivalent to the 50 page definition. In this a way, a standard novel would be worth 6 reading units. 100 reading units would complete the challenge and be the equivalent of reading about 17 standard 300 page novels. This is still challenging for most people to do (especially in L2) and the evidence both empirical and observational seem to suggest that doing this would still give the participants a dramatic boost to their language abilities.
Web pages could be counted by defining a standard page to have x amount of words. These days, I'm sure a web page's words can be counted in some way by a computer.