Now here is some good news to get this blog started in the new year:
According to a new National Endowment for the Arts study, reading among American adults is up for the first time since 1982.
DID YOU HEAR WHAT I SAID? READING IS UP!
This is fantastic news for writers and lovers of literature.
And check this out:
Young adults show the most rapid increases in literary reading. Since 2002, 18-24 year olds have seen the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary reading, and the most rapid rate of increase (21 percent). This jump reversed a 20 percent rate of decline in the 2002 survey, the steepest rate of decline since the NEA survey began.
You can read more about the study here.
I am thrilled, and I hope you are too. Here's to a great, positive new year!
Showing posts with label Literacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literacy. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, August 11, 2008
Attention Luddites: The Internet is Here and It is Not Going Away
A couple weeks ago, I read an interesting article in the New York Times about literacy in the wake of the internet age. The central question of the article is whether reading online is as valuable to building reading comprehension skills as reading in the more traditional way.
The article raises some interesting points, on both sides of the issue, including referencing the discouraging report on national reading trends, To Read or Not To Read; A Question of National Consequence, that was published by the National Endowment for the Arts in November 2007. I call the report "discouraging" because it documents a marked decline in the reading habits and skills of young Americans in just the last 15 years. The full report can be viewed in PDF form here, and it is fascinating.
It seems only natural that experts would be looking to the rise and expansion of the internet as a factor in the decline of reading comprehension skills. As pleasure reading amongst children decreases and time spent on the computer increases, it's fair to ask the questions, what kind of reading is being done on the internet, and what is its value?
The New York Times article profiles a couple different youngsters, including one who prefers reading anime fan fiction online to reading books. If you're a writer, especially in the young adult market, and you haven't perused FanFiction.net, you need to take some time to check it out. The writing featured on the site is entirely user generated, and the stories have wildly inconsistent levels of grammar, punctuation and coherence. So much so that while you might be encouraged that a young person is at least finding somewhere to read online, you can't help but ask yourself if what they are reading isn't equally important.
That said, I don't dismiss reading on the internet as a whole as useless. In some ways, reading on the internet builds a different kind of comprehensive skill, one that no doubt will be a necessity in the not-too-distant future, as this generation, raised on the internet, becomes adults.
The question that I keep coming back to is that as a writer of traditional literature, how do I address the changing way that people are reading? Is Amazon's Kindle the answer? Or is that just another way of serving traditional literature in a different way?
So let me ask you: How can we rethink storytelling in the internet age?
The article raises some interesting points, on both sides of the issue, including referencing the discouraging report on national reading trends, To Read or Not To Read; A Question of National Consequence, that was published by the National Endowment for the Arts in November 2007. I call the report "discouraging" because it documents a marked decline in the reading habits and skills of young Americans in just the last 15 years. The full report can be viewed in PDF form here, and it is fascinating.
It seems only natural that experts would be looking to the rise and expansion of the internet as a factor in the decline of reading comprehension skills. As pleasure reading amongst children decreases and time spent on the computer increases, it's fair to ask the questions, what kind of reading is being done on the internet, and what is its value?
The New York Times article profiles a couple different youngsters, including one who prefers reading anime fan fiction online to reading books. If you're a writer, especially in the young adult market, and you haven't perused FanFiction.net, you need to take some time to check it out. The writing featured on the site is entirely user generated, and the stories have wildly inconsistent levels of grammar, punctuation and coherence. So much so that while you might be encouraged that a young person is at least finding somewhere to read online, you can't help but ask yourself if what they are reading isn't equally important.
That said, I don't dismiss reading on the internet as a whole as useless. In some ways, reading on the internet builds a different kind of comprehensive skill, one that no doubt will be a necessity in the not-too-distant future, as this generation, raised on the internet, becomes adults.
The question that I keep coming back to is that as a writer of traditional literature, how do I address the changing way that people are reading? Is Amazon's Kindle the answer? Or is that just another way of serving traditional literature in a different way?
So let me ask you: How can we rethink storytelling in the internet age?
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