Words, Words, Words: The Case Against Dumbing Down
Geraldine McCaughrean
Sunday, 31 March 2019
12:00pm
1 hour
Bodleian: Divinity School
£7 - £12.50
Carnegie medal winning children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean argues against publishers’ demand for ‘accessible prose’ and warns it could create an underclass easy to manipulate and lacking the skills to reason their way out.
McCaughrean originally made her comments on accepting the 2018 Carnegie Medal for her novel Where the World Ends. She said readers “should be bombarded with words like gamma rays, steeped in words like pot plants stood in water, pelted with them like confetti, fed on them like Alphabetti spaghetti, given Hamlet’s last resort: ‘Words. Words. Words.’” A US publisher recently turned down one of McCaughrean’s novels for being too difficult, citing use of the word ‘gallimaufry’.
McCaughrean has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal twice: first in 1998 with A Pack of Lies. She has also won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award (four times) and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award.
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Words, Words, Words: The Case Against Dumbing Down
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