literacy

The curse of the writer is not to be read - be it an obscure blog on the Internet or in a letter to the editor of a newspaper or even a simple fax. To sit and write anything while trying to convey ideas, information and emotion takes not just an effort but a hope that someone will understand what the writer is trying to convey.

The simpler things can be conveyed through a small amount of words - enough so that they can suffer the textual limitations of a Twitter update or a Facebook status update. The more complicated things take a bit more.

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in. - William Saroyan, My Name Is Aram, 1940.

One of the things that irks me most is when people purposefully make it difficult to be understood by the majority of people who encounter their communiques. Much has been written about the 'downgrading' of language on the Internet - but that's not my focus here. My focus is on literacy.

If I write, "I ain't got no good English", anyone who speaks English can understand the implicit joke. And that joke is that the sentence makes sense and is understood despite the fact that schools teach that the sentence isn't proper English. We know what it means. But if you toss that same sentence at someone who doesn't speak English well, they may not understand. And the role of communication, for those who need reminding, is to communicate. With whom does one wish to communicate?

Manuel Marino posted a troublesome piece for me - a piece about reading - or lack of it. He's quoting an article by Isaac Marion who runs BurningBuilding.com while working various jobs until his writing/music/art career take off.

I know that feeling.

But the article itself is worth the read - for those of you that do read, and it made me think of the journey of reading. These days, the 'semantic web' and search engines are the glory of the internet - but they are, I think, a hollow glory. It has been my experience that the most interesting things are found by accident - not on purpose. At first, they may not even be useful in a practical sense.