Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander
Published 1978 · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Media & Technology, Nonfiction
How hard is Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television to read?
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television scores 42 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Accessible. Some advertising and neuroscience terms.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Concrete examples supporting abstract arguments.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with examples and evidence.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Four-part argumentative structure.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Television as symbol of technological colonization.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- An ad man arguing against the medium he mastered.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The conclusion—eliminate TV—is stated from the start.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Four self-contained arguments.
How Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is regarded
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television holds a literary regard score of 36 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.