This is the post I was thinking of writing last time, but I got distracted thinking about why people just don't read. The fact remains that most people read words on a page/screen, & then put them together in the way that they expect them to be arranged, rather than the way they are arranged in a particular context. Reading requires imagination.
People tend to read what they think is there. This is why, if yuo wreit in scuh a way taht the benginig & end are croerct, tehn msot popele wlil udnresatnd the wrod. However, the effort of doing so has diminished the meaning of the sentence, because it took so much effort to interpret the micro-level words that the macro-level sense & meaning would take another reading.
The same goes for poorly-constructed paragraphs where the sentences need grammatical manipulation to make sense, poorly-constructed articles where the paragraphs don't connect, etc. We spend so much time deciphering the small linguistic units that we fail to get the message of the writer. A good reader can understand a paragraph's intent immediately, without needing to read the words.
I do agree with you that that's mostly the writer's fault, but it's the fault of all of us for tolerating such writers - encouraging them by accepting their shoddy workmanship, their slap-dash approach to competitively producing quantity & relevance over quality & timelessness. What have always been described as "the classics", are those books written in such a way that they can be read many times, garnering new meaning with each reading - if you are discerning enough.
Meanwhile, the best-seller list consists of the latest tome from writers who pump out near-identical ideas multiple times a year, so as to survive in the cut-throat publishing business.
This is what people are reading - the words thrown together to be digested easily like the equivalent of fast food. You don't think about it, & chewing is even optional. Just swallow it & come back again when you're hungry. Good books should be like fine dining - it takes planning, time, expectation, delight, & satisfaction - to the point of wanting to share the experience with others.
Aside from most people missing the exposure to good books through their "education", a lot of people simply don't know what a good book is, so they start reading low quality pulp, get put off by the experience, & return to either not reading at all, or else limiting themselves to technical manuals & the like.
Encouraging people to read more means helping them to read the sort of books likely to make them want to keep reading. Even if they don't get the full depth of possibilities with their first forays into the world of books, they are far more likely to keep trying if they get something out of each book they read.
10 August 2014
03 August 2014
Three "Ah!"s
People are no longer being taught to read or write (or add).
The younger generation will be up in arms, tweeting their denials.
The older generation will nod their heads wisely & get back to their spy thriller.
Society is to blame.
I'm moving too fast, so I'll back up a bit ... a long way. Once upon a time, there was a big gap between the educated & the uneducated. Those who learned to read & write (& do maths) were the elite. They had time on their hands. They read the words of those held in honour by their teachers - people who were respected by all educated people. Although they could put quill to paper, they would rarely consider the possibility of writing for a wide audience themselves - that was a task for the few greats.
The spread of education over the years meant that, as people started filling in the gap between the educated & non-educated - the burgeoning middle class of education, if you will - & saw the advantages of being able to read & write, & how it held those with the skill so far above those who couldn't, they encouraged others to be brought up from the uneducated into the semi-educated class. They sometimes had the support & encouragement of the educated.
However, & this is the key - it was never (or very rarely) the educated who took the illiterate to a higher level, it was the semi-educated sharing their knowledge, which had been gleaned from the educated in a diminished (often begrudging) manner. It takes great dedication & perseverance to take an illiterate person to the level of being highly (tertiary) educated. It always has done. This is why the task of doing it was given to the semi-educated, who pushed themselves up the education scale at the same time (making a bigger range in the middle educated). This could never have made them members of the educated elite, of itself. It only made them the most educated of the semi-educated.
Now, Western society "expects" almost everyone to be literate - but only by the standard of the educators, who still belong to that middle band. Those being educated have little or no access to the truly educated elite. However, they are arrogant enough to believe that they can learn everything from the one source & have achieved greatness as the result of an ordinary education. The truth is, they are the new illiterate - the lowest educated in society.
People who are told that they can read & write will believe it. But if you ask them to do so, the result is not particularly enlightening. Someone who "can write" could well still have trouble writing in complete sentences or making a message clear. Similarly, someone who "can read" may not be able to decipher a simple paragraph of text giving instructions for how to operate their smart phone.
Some "educated" people - those whose university degrees border on the vocational - including teachers - don't read books. They read manuals or guides, full of jargon & pictures. They do not read books full of ideas.
Some "educated" people who write blogs (like this one) don't automatically have ideas worth sharing, even if they can indeed communicate in the first place, just because they have a blog.
Yet we find teenagers who think that what they have to say is so amazing that they should receive praise for their ability to tap a few keys (like "photo" & "send"), & that being the first to know who of their circle has done likewise is a substitute for caring.
So, that's the problem - we (society) arrogantly assume that what we have been taught within & by our social system is all that there is to offer. Accepting this, we assume that we are at the pinnacle of the social tree because we can, indeed, read a newspaper headline & spell a hashtag.
I say that's just not good enough.
The younger generation will be up in arms, tweeting their denials.
The older generation will nod their heads wisely & get back to their spy thriller.
Society is to blame.
I'm moving too fast, so I'll back up a bit ... a long way. Once upon a time, there was a big gap between the educated & the uneducated. Those who learned to read & write (& do maths) were the elite. They had time on their hands. They read the words of those held in honour by their teachers - people who were respected by all educated people. Although they could put quill to paper, they would rarely consider the possibility of writing for a wide audience themselves - that was a task for the few greats.
The spread of education over the years meant that, as people started filling in the gap between the educated & non-educated - the burgeoning middle class of education, if you will - & saw the advantages of being able to read & write, & how it held those with the skill so far above those who couldn't, they encouraged others to be brought up from the uneducated into the semi-educated class. They sometimes had the support & encouragement of the educated.
However, & this is the key - it was never (or very rarely) the educated who took the illiterate to a higher level, it was the semi-educated sharing their knowledge, which had been gleaned from the educated in a diminished (often begrudging) manner. It takes great dedication & perseverance to take an illiterate person to the level of being highly (tertiary) educated. It always has done. This is why the task of doing it was given to the semi-educated, who pushed themselves up the education scale at the same time (making a bigger range in the middle educated). This could never have made them members of the educated elite, of itself. It only made them the most educated of the semi-educated.
Now, Western society "expects" almost everyone to be literate - but only by the standard of the educators, who still belong to that middle band. Those being educated have little or no access to the truly educated elite. However, they are arrogant enough to believe that they can learn everything from the one source & have achieved greatness as the result of an ordinary education. The truth is, they are the new illiterate - the lowest educated in society.
People who are told that they can read & write will believe it. But if you ask them to do so, the result is not particularly enlightening. Someone who "can write" could well still have trouble writing in complete sentences or making a message clear. Similarly, someone who "can read" may not be able to decipher a simple paragraph of text giving instructions for how to operate their smart phone.
Some "educated" people - those whose university degrees border on the vocational - including teachers - don't read books. They read manuals or guides, full of jargon & pictures. They do not read books full of ideas.
Some "educated" people who write blogs (like this one) don't automatically have ideas worth sharing, even if they can indeed communicate in the first place, just because they have a blog.
Yet we find teenagers who think that what they have to say is so amazing that they should receive praise for their ability to tap a few keys (like "photo" & "send"), & that being the first to know who of their circle has done likewise is a substitute for caring.
So, that's the problem - we (society) arrogantly assume that what we have been taught within & by our social system is all that there is to offer. Accepting this, we assume that we are at the pinnacle of the social tree because we can, indeed, read a newspaper headline & spell a hashtag.
I say that's just not good enough.
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