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Arminius comments on SotW: Be Specific - Less Wrong
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Exercise I:
Let the students introduce their favorite novel (or movie) to the group and let them explain why this novel is so great and what sets it apart from similar books.
Exercise II:
Give the students examples of texts that fail to be specific, from different Areas ( Science Articles, Wikipedia entries, amazon customer reviews, interviews with experts or politicians , LW discussions, user manuals, textbooks, ... ). Let the students analyse what exactly the problem of the given example is and let them write down an improved version.
I think this exercise will help with being specific, but at the cost of straying from your TRUE reasons for liking/disliking. i.e. in order to think of specific things to list, you will rationalize.
For example, maybe you really like Movie A just because you found it entertaining, but since you have to list specific reason, your brain spits back things like "dynamic character development", and "break-down of good v evil dichotomy" etc.
IIRC, there have been studies where if they just ask for people's opinions on which jam/wine/art/etc is better, the study participants are LESS accurate (less in agreement with expert opinion) when asked to name specific reasons for why the chose one over the other. I don't remember the specifics or validity of the study, though.
That doesn't count as a true reason. In fact, it is no more than a restatement of the fact that you like it. If you didn't find it entertaining, then that means you found it boring, which is incompatible with liking it. (Can you imagine anyone saying "I found this movie boring, but I liked it anyway?")
To say "I just found it entertaining" as an answer to the question of why one likes something is not an honest-but-unspecific answer; it is an outright dodge.
(If anything, it's a weaker statement than saying you like it, because one could conceivably dislike something despite not being bored by it.)
Good point. Replace "It was entertaining" with "It had flashy action scenes".
I felt this way about Brokeback Mountain, IIRC.
Oh, and Waiting for Godot. Which I saw as a play, not a movie, but the principle is the same.
Yes. Me and most romance novels, for example.
This seems extremely likely.
There's a book called How Fiction Works-- I wouldn't say it actually explains how fiction works, but it does include a fair amount about how our ideas of literary fiction (well-rounded characters and a lot of visual detail, for example) developed, and examples from classics that don't match what's considered literary.