On Language and Literacy

Our language has been running into problems for a while now, and lately they seem to be getting worse. Our educational system is breeding two types of illiteracy. The first one is the obvious one. Many schools, especially those in impoverished areas, teach to tests so that they can continue to get funding. What this means is that schools that have few resources and are overcrowded allow their students to graduate with only a basic level of comprehension of English. Lately, many people advocate that there is no need for concern. They say, "Well, they can still communicate effectively. And isn't that the point of language? Who cares if they don't know all the rules or the grammar."

It's true that the point of language is to communicate effectively, always has been. For the last several decades, however, our methods of communication have been changing. While this has been a long occurring process, since radio and television came about, it has been progressing at a much faster rate lately with the consistent increase in Internet use. We no longer think in words, we think in images. Media highlights our day-to-day life. We still read every day. We read on Facebook, Fmylife, Online News, Blogs, Emails, and so on. However, it's a different kind of reading, more fast paced and to the point. Modern writers such as Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Stephen King, and the rest recognize this and cater their writing to the audience. They focus much less on the literary aspect of language and instead concentrate on the story telling aspect in their novels, making their books easy to read, fast paced, and full of suspense. However, give the average person a novel by Faulkner these days and he'll balk at the task of reading it.

Nonetheless, many say that this new style of language is not necessarily bad. This is true, as it is an effective method of communication. We write in this quick way on Aim and Facebook. However, if this is the only method of communication at your disposal, if this is all that your school has provided you with, you are handicapped in our society. With many American students illiterate to the point where a high school senior is reading at a 6^th grade level, this handicaps them in terms of getting a job, talking to clients, writing effective emails and letters, getting into college, and even in college, getting good grades. Thus, it is not simply about getting your point across. The best and most obvious way for literacy to increase is to get people reading again.

However, there is another kind of illiteracy in this country and it is overliteracy. You've no doubt seen this at some point. It usually appears in speeches, technical documents, educational resources, and other "scholarly" areas. Overliteracy occurs when writing is infiltrated by a score of nonsense words to make it appear smarter. For example, "the synchronized transitional capability of our modern infrastructure..." What does that mean? Nothing. It is jargon that clouds our ability to communicate effectively and yet still occurs all the time. The problem is that the higher up the ladder you go, the more prone you are to reading this. The more you read it, the more you write it, in fact, the more you have to write it. Students in their Ph.D. studies write like this to get A's, politicians use this to pretend to know what they're talking about, and technical documents are littered with such terms to cover up the fact that they're not saying a thing. The more it is used, the more it proliferates.

Thus we have two types of illiteracy on both sides of the socioeconomic spectrum that is narrowing our ability to effectively use our language. On the one hand, we can't simply write the way we speak, as it cripples us in many regards. Not to mention that without an effective use of your language, without being able to write clearly what you think, your very thoughts become muddled. However, on the other hand, we can't be so overliterate that our language becomes so complex to the point that it conveys absolutely nothing. The simplest remedy, as stated before, is to read. (Just not those aforementioned technical documents.) Our language is changing. We must learn how to effectively adapt it to suit our needs.