Literacy, Broadly Speaking

For the last 300 years, every aging generation claims that the up-and-coming generation is illiterate, undisciplined, and certain to doom the English language—but they always seem to be wrong.

Why do you suppose that is?

I have a few ideas—some of which I have learned from the astute observations of my students:

Culprit #1: Pride and Nostalgia

People over the age of 25 tend to have an over-fondness for how things used to be, offering priceless nonsense like, "Back in my day, every high-school graduate knew all the rules of grammar and could recite entire Shakespearean sonnets! Now all kids know how to do is text frowny faces." Quite often these complainers understand that language evolves over time, but they seem to believe that it peaked just about the time they were graduating high school. So while all change prior to that moment was change for the better—change, that is, that led to this perfect state of English—all change that came after that was mere degradation: the beginning of the English language’s slow demise.

The following graphic illustrates what this looks like. Imagine it like this: Sally graduates college in 1955 and enters the workforce with her mastery of English grammar and an ability to write beautifully. Soon, however, words, phrases, and ways of speaking that she has never heard are suddenly becoming popular and finding their way into newspaper articles, books, and magazines. She tries to keep up with it all, but then she tells herself it’s just a fad. She has small children at home, and even though she reads to them from the best books and is always quick to correct their grammar, they eventually grow up and start coming home from high school talking circles around her. She can’t keep up with all the weird stuff they say. She waves it off as teenage rebellion but then starts to worry that when they go off to college, their professors don’t correct them. She wonders what has happened to her beloved English, and she mourns a bizarre sense of loss.

And this isn’t to pick on Sally or anyone else born in the 1930s. This could have been the story of someone from 1830, 1630, or 2230. Folks born right now will graduate in the 2030s, and by the 2050s they’ll be complaining about all the kids ruining the English language. And this will continue for millennia, until fifteen hundred years from now English has morphed into something wholly unrecognizable, and it will probably have a different name altogether.

Culprit #2: A Belief in the Queen's (or King’s) English

Folks who decry the downfall of the English language are also usually the same ones who think they know all the rules of grammar, and they hold these rules as sacrosanct. Part of the problem, though, is that they don’t all use the same rulebook. Some might adhere to the tenets put forth in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, or their middle-school textbook, or the Purdue Online Writing Lab, or a laminated grammar cheat-sheet they bought for 99 cents in the campus bookstore. Wherever it is they’re getting their so-called “rules,” they are 100 percent sure they were scripted before the dawn of time and anyone with half a brain should have already memorized them.

If you pick up copies of the style guides for MLA, APA, AMA, AP, and Chicago, each will give you different rules for things like capitalization, abbreviation, and the use of numbers. The so-called rules of English are as arbitrary as men’s fashion. These rules were invented by groups and committees. MLA, for example, came about in the early 1950s when a bunch of English professors at a literature convention decided it would be a good idea to codify some of the rules for citing sources to make it easier for students as they moved from class to class and college to college. They did it so students could focus more on developing ideas and organizing their thoughts and less on figuring out every professor’s different rules for formatting a research paper.

These rules, which are continually being revised, are based primarily on the English language as it happened to have been spoken in Western London in the eighteenth century, when folks decided to start writing down the rules of the King’s English and putting together dictionaries. How different would the rules have been if a chap from Eastern London or Belfast or Sydney or Baltimore had been the first to codify the rules? What if they had started doing this a century earlier or a century later? These rules are more like a descriptive snapshot of the time, yet we hold them as prescriptive imperatives. But the truth is these men were no more enlightened or capable of declaring the English language perfect than Sally was 200 hundred years later.

Steven Pinker (2015) explains this eloquently when he says, "Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn" (p. 3).

Culprit #3: Fear of Change

It can be difficult to keep up with technology. A natural reaction is to claim new trends are just that, a trend, and that soon enough they'll go away and we'll return back to "normal"—but there is no normal when it comes to English. It's just one trend after another until one day our descendants will read our books and marvel at how wonky our English was.

Steven Pinker (2015) argues that "as people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline--the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it" (p. 4).

Texting is an oft-cited culprit in the so-called deterioration of the English language. I have been teaching for nearly twenty years, and I can tell you that I have never received an essay from a student that used “text speak,” such as LOL or L8R or Ha Ha. My students are multi-dialectal, and they do just fine switching between their text-English dialect and their academic-English dialect. If anything, I would argue that they are even more literate than previous generations because of the vast amount of instant written communication they do every single day starting at a very young age. And along those lines, I have seen Facebook updates, Tweets, and Instagram captions that are every bit as terse and poetic as anything written by Donne, Whitman, or Angelou. Whether they realize it or not, the up-and-coming generation are wordsmiths: they play with language more than any generation that has preceded them, and that translates directly into their academic-writing efforts.

Culprit #4: A Misunderstanding about the Meaning of “Literacy”

A big problem I find when discussing literacy is that people tend to have a very limited and misguided definition of literacy.

I have come to realize that people conceive of literacy in one of three ways: as an either-or proposition (you are either literate or you aren't literate), as a spectrum (everyone is literate to some degree), or as a term to refer to multiple literacies. I'll discuss each in turn, but I don't mind saying up front that I'm a big fan of door number three: the notion of multiple literacies.

Either-Or Definition of Literacy:

Literacy too often is thought of as an either-or state of being: you're either literate or you aren't. And the people who tend to believe this usually have a very limited and unforgiving standard for deciding that literacy threshold. Maybe it is your ability to recite Shakespeare. Maybe it's your command of grammar. It could be your ACT score. It might be how convincing your last email was. Usually, these people look at literacy in terms of reading and writing.

While reading and writing are a huge part of literacy, they only account for a small portion of what literacy actually is. Literacy is your ability to make sense of the world around you. This might include your proficiency with math, art, music, sports, speaking, and so on. There really is no limit. This definition might seem rather broad and all-encompassing. That's okay.

Some common literacies my students have identified over the years include:

• Reading Literacy

• Writing Literacy

• Speaking Literacy

• Linguistic Literacy

• Cultural Literacy

• Sports Literacy

• Information Literacy

• Financial Literacy

• Scientific Literacy

• Emotional Literacy

Really, anything that requires practice and the acquisition of skill and knowledge to master can be considered a form of literacy.

It's possible to buy into this broad definition of literacy and still find yourself clinging to the either-or fallacy: either you are good with math or you aren't; either you are good with money or you aren't; and so on. But I'm inclined to believe that if you're willing to view literacy from such a wide-angle lens as to accept that sports has its own literacy, then it stands to reason that you won't be so quick as to simply judge someone on an either-or basis. When it comes to sports, I'm pretty good at talking about it. In that sense, I'm semi-literate. But I'm no good at playing sports. In basketball, if you pass me the ball, I will take the shot no matter where I am on the court. In that sense, I'm about as illiterate as they come. Taken as a whole, though, I just don't think you could accurately peg me as either literate or illiterate in sports—there's so much more going on with me.

Spectrum Definition of Literacy:

I have to believe that every conscious human being is literate in one way or another. Even babies. I remember when my first two children were born (twins—a boy and a girl), it seemed that within minutes, they started to develop an awareness of the world. Though they didn't have words for it, they knew if they cried, they would get comfort. Before long, they could recognize faces. It doesn't seem like much, but these two simple knowledge sets—cry and I get fed, or that face is someone I trust—are forms of literacy. They were developing their own systems for understanding the world around them.

That being said, everyone is literate in some sense. There is no such thing as illiteracy. You can only say that someone is less or more literate than someone else.

Again, this concept of literacy can be equally applied to a narrow definition (that literacy equals reading and writing) or to my broad definition (that there are many types of literacy).

“Multiple Literacies” View of Literacy:

Usually if someone believes that everyone is literate in some way or another, and if they believe that there are different ways in which we are literate, then they will be comfortable using the term literacies. There is no such thing as literacy (singular), only literacies (plural).

In the simple illustration that follows, you can see that a person will define her literacy in terms of how literate she feels in these multiple literacies. The person in this example considers herself highly literate in reading, moderately literate with money and culture, and on the lower-end of literacy in terms of math. Who knows what other forms of literacy she chose not to put on this chart.

I like this concept of literacy not just because it is all-encompassing and accurate but because it encourages people, especially students, to identify what they are good at. If you're not great at writing but you're good with numbers, that's okay. I consider myself highly literate in writing but less-literate with math (I used to joke that I had number dyslexia, but then I found out that was a real thing called dyscalculia, and my friend had it, so now I just say, "numbers aren't my favorite").

I also like this concept because you can sub-divide any form of literacy into other literacies. I consider myself a good writer, but I can't write poetry. I also can't read it—well, I can, but I can't really make sense of it, nor do I enjoy it. I would say I'm very literate with prose, but not very literate with poesy. I'm also more literate in research writing than I am fiction writing. I could subdivide my reading and writing skills on and on, and the more I divide it up, the more I realize what areas I need to work on and the ones where I excel.

If you did the same, you likely would find that there are things you're particularly good at when it comes to writing, and areas that could use some more work.

What are you good at when it comes to writing? What do you enjoy reading? What do you want to improve? If you find yourself ever saying, "I'm no good at writing," you're probably using the narrow either-or conception of literacy. I bet if you really think about it, you’ll find ways in which you are highly literate, even when it comes to writing.