# helping OP read a book



## dojibear

Most OP questions in the "English-only" forum are of two types:

(1) OP has an English grammar question, and gives us example sentences to ask it.
(2) OP saw a phrase in English they didn't understand. They ask us to explain it in ways they understand.

But there is also a third type:

(3) OP is reading an entire book (usually an old book). Every phrase they don't understand becomes a forum question.

Sometimes type (3) occurs a lot (five times each day). I dislike that. I'm not here to help OP read a book. If the book is too hard, OP should (in my humble opinion) read a simpler book or a more modern book, not ask us to explain something on every page. As far as I know, (3) is not against the rules, so when I see several of these, I put OP on "Ignore", which removes all 5 questions each day. 

If this only bothers me, I have no suggestion. Just call me a curmudgeon. If it bothers many people, is there a reasonable way to change it?

signed, Grumpy McBear


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## Paulfromitaly

There's also type (4): OP systematically and extensively (I'm not talking about a one-off request) asks for proofreading of their homework, assignments, paid tasks etc.
I for one would rather help people understand, say, Oscar Wilde than help them cheat or misrepresent their English proficiency by proofreading everything they write, so that would be my pet peeve.
As you have already pointed out, you don't have to help everyone - you can be more...selective and make good use of the ignore feature


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## swift

Paulfromitaly said:


> As you have already pointed out, you don't have to help everyone


Amen!


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## velisarius

On more than one occasion, a series of threads with questions about a work of literature has prompted me to read or re-read the work in question. I think we all have our pet hates; I ignore most punctuation and pronunciation questions because they leave me cold.


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## Myridon

dojibear said:


> (3) OP is reading an entire book (usually an old book). Every phrase they don't understand becomes a forum question.


There was a poster who asked multiple questions per day about two Jack London books over a period of several years.  I checked a few times and the questions were not in any sort of order.  My guess is that we wrote his doctoral thesis.


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## lauranazario

Another type of issue I've seen is people opening threads asking for translation help with a source text they do not comprehend.
It's clear that the person has taken on a translation assignment they cannot handle and they're in waaaaay over their head. 

How can you tell? Because when users ask for context/background info and/or clarification, they're not able to provide it simply because they have no clear idea as to what the text is actually communicating.


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## Sowka

I think as long as the request(s) are within the scope of our rules, there's no problem.


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## lauranazario

Sowka said:


> I think as long as the request(s) are within the scope of our rules, there's no problem.


Sure, I was merely adding another type/class/category of threads to the ones presented by dojibear.


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## Tegs

I don't mind multiple questions about specific books at all. If I've read the book I'm often glad to see a learner is attempting to read it, because I enjoyed it myself. 

What I dislike is when a question is asked and answered, and the person who posted it continues arguing vehemently, despite all answers to the contrary, that their interpretation is correct. I find those very frustrating. But hurray for the ignore button!


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## kentix

I've only ever ignored one person. And that was because he was complaining about getting answers to his questions that were correcting previous erroneous information but brought his threads back to the home page, sometimes causing a technical violation of the flooding rule because he posted a lot. He made threats to try to enforce his "no more answers" policy on "his" threads. But to me, threads belong to the community and leaving inaccurate information as the last word for future visitors with the same type of question is a disservice to them. I understood his side of things but thought, on balance, accuracy was more important. So eventually, after a few rounds of that, I just blocked him. He eventually got banned (not by my doing, I'm not a big fan of that) and the problem went away.

Which segues into the flooding rule. The flooding rule is designed to deal with the OP scenario through limiting the posts by an individual user. I just skip the posts I'm not interested in, which I find easy enough to do. When I realize every post from a certain poster is on a book that I find uninteresting, I just visually scan past that poster. At most it's five posts.


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## Dripweed

I'm not especially bothered by multiple questions about a particular book.  Answering such questions can be enjoyable, particularly if the book is well-written.  More than once I've found myself sufficiently intrigued by a passage of text, to go off in search of more information about the book in question or other works by the same author.   Indeed, I've often wondered whether such questions could be 'tagged' in some way, so that future readers of, say, _The Count of Monte Cristo_ or _Great Expectations _could easily locate all of the previous discussions relating to those texts.


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## Tegs

Dripweed said:


> I've often wondered whether such questions could be 'tagged' in some way, so that future readers of, say, _The Count of Monte Cristo_ or _Great Expectations _could easily locate all of the previous discussions relating to those texts.


That sounds useful!


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## Sowka

Actually, if the forer@s starting a thread have properly indicated their sources, you can do a full-text search by means of the magnifying glass "Search" field in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, "advanced search".

I just did a search for "monte cristo" in the French-English forum, and found quite a few threads.

Keyword: monte cristo
Search in: French-English Vocabulary
Give results as: Threads

Enjoy


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## LVRBC

I actually like helping people read a book, although I like it more if I think it's a good book.  I only dislike "literature questions" when it becomes clear that they are not reading a book, but selecting strange excerpts from odd sources for no particular reason.


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## Myridon

kentix said:


> Which segues into the flooding rule. The flooding rule is designed to deal with the OP scenario through limiting the posts by an individual user. I just skip the posts I'm not interested in, which I find easy enough to do. When I realize every post from a certain poster is on a book that I find uninteresting, I just visually scan past that poster. At most it's five posts.


I don't think that's what it's for, though. Those five posts push five other posts to the second page.  I rarely if ever get to the second page in English Only.  The people who posted those five posts are less likely to get answers because the other person flooded the front page.


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## dojibear

To my way of thinking, a person who posts 5 new questions each day (150 new questions each month) about the same 1850s book they are reading is asking us to "translate this book into modern simple English". It is really a translation issue, not a language question.

One way to tell the difference is when the person marks a long section and asks us to re-word all of it. That is translation.

A question is usually about a word or a phrase, and often suggests alternatives, asking "which is more correct?"

A different annoying situation: sometimes people post a (modern English) paragraph. They understand the words, but not the deeper meaning. They are asking for an interpretation. Read between the lines. Explain the 500-year history between these two countries, in one short, easy-to-understand sentence. As we say here in Fresno, "let me get back to you about that..."


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## Paulfromitaly

dojibear said:


> To my way of thinking, a person who posts 5 new questions each day (150 new questions each month) about the same 1850s book they are reading is asking us to "translate this book into modern simple English".


I agree with you.
Again, you can ignore that user or any user who, in your opinion, is barraging the forum with far too many questions.
You can also get in touch with the mods of the relevant forum and ask them for clarification.


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## merquiades

@dojibear   If I were you I'd just stop reading and answering the questions dealing with books.  Once you figure out (s)he is reading a book and posting about it, just ignore.  As someone says you don't have to answer everything.  Also you can skip page one, and go straight to page two if you want to get to those 5 questions that have been pushed off.


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