Tips and Insights

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people
to stop reading them." Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451

I can't believe that while I sat writing this blog at lunch a couple weeks ago, two of our illustrators were looking at an Amazon.com ad that asked them to pick their "favorite father" (in honor of Father's Day). One jokingly chose Darth Vader, the other, Tony Soprano. I looked over their shoulders at the choices and said, "What? You have to pick Atticus Finch."

That stumped both illustrators. Neither knew Atticus Finch. When I explained he was the father in To Kill a Mockingbird-an Academy Award-winning movie adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book-they both said, "Oh yeah, I think I've seen the movie, but I never read the book."

How can two people, growing up in our world today, not know Atticus Finch? Okay, I say that facetiously, but I was still disappointed. I like to think that the people I know appreciate books the same way I do, and that even though they're fifteen or twenty years younger, I'm still speaking a language they know.

A few people at work freely admit to not reading, not wanting to read. Even I don't read as much as I'd like. I blame it on a lack of time, though I could easily read twenty minutes a day and finish four or five books a year. Can we blame electronic media for the upsurge in aliteracy, then, as many people claim, or are we at fault?

And how does the way we conduct business add to it?

Because businesses and their marketing departments realize many people don't like to read, they're designing products that don't require reading. Look at the symbols and icons in our world. Look at the packaging of products-the number of those that incorporate colors and shapes as a way to convey meaning. Blogs like this are also culprits-short bursts of text, conversational, not too dense, often including pictures.

Though we'll always have our Ray Bradburys and Harper Lees creating stories that elicit some interaction with the reader, we have more and more text and trade books meeting the needs of aliterates. Instead of reading Cliffs Notes to get the gist of a book, many novels are being written like Cliffs Notes. Soon we'll only have to read a list and we'll have the book completed.

So, how do I reconcile what I've written in these last two blogs with what we do here at Explainers? After all, we are in the business of taking complicated, often textual documents, and making them easy to use. This usually requires graphics, symbols and simplified text-those "evil contributors" to aliteracy.

I'll address that incongruity in Part 3 of this series.

Labels: aliteracy