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Is reading in
America a dying pursuit? The NEA seems to think so, after doing an in-depth
study of the situation (read entire report at www.nea.gov.)
“Reading at
Risk” surveyed over 17,000 adults (age 18 or older), asking them about their
reading habits in regards to novels, short stories, poetry and/or plays. The focus was mainly on literary reading
trends for “Reading at Risk.”
In a separate
study entitled “To Read or Not to Read,” statistics were gathered from more
than 40 national studies on reading habits of children, teenagers and adults.
This study dealt with all kinds of reading: books, magazines, newspapers,
online reading.
According to the
NEA, less than 1/3 of 13-year-olds read for pleasure every day, a 14% decline
from 20 years ago. The percentage of
17-year-old non-readers doubled in that same twenty-year span. If you’re an
American between the ages of 15 and 24, you spend 2 hours a day watching television,
but only 7 minutes a day reading, according to this study.
Timothy
Shanahan, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and past
president of the International Reading Association says that many young people
say they don’t read because it’s lonely. When they are online or text
messaging, they feel involved with others, but they do not feel this sense of
community when reading by themselves. “What kids like about IM-ing and text
messaging is that it’s playful and interactive and connects then to their
friends,’ said Shanahan in an article entitled “The Grim Reader” in the
March/April issue of Poets & Writers. (pp.10-13).
Shanahan
continued, “The Harry Potter books were popular not mainly because of this
wonderful story and the language, I don’t think, but because it was this huge
phenomenon that allowed young people to participate in it. What was exciting was reading what your
friends were reading and talking to them about it. People of all ages are hungry for that kind of community.”
The article
continues discussing the need for community and how the Internet seems to fill
that void for many disconnected individuals. It is not difficult to see that
reading a book, as opposed to going online, might suffer, if the desire for
feedback and community, lacking in today’s anonymous society is satisfied most
by the online substitute for actual human interaction.
One only has to
go online to any blog to see the decline and fall of the language. A young
friend with degrees in computer science tells me, “They didn’t teach us that
stuff,” when I ask him about his spelling, grammar, syntax mistakes. By “they”
he means, of course, his English teachers, and I have heard this refrain from
my students at six colleges in my day. I “taught this stuff” for almost 20
years to 12 and 13-year-olds. In my classes, we labored long and hard over
grammar, spelling, syntax, subject/verb agreement, etc.
When and why
did the attempts to teach our native tongue—complete with grammar, syntax,
etc.--- stop? This very bright young man now finds himself completely
qualified to do the technical side of blogging, but handicapped by a lack of proficiency
in those areas.
I remember that,
when I began teaching at the junior high school level in 1969, my students
routinely wrote short stories, which were then taken to the high school
Creative Writing class(es) for judging. By the time I left my public school
classroom in 1985, the students coming up from the grades below no longer could
write a coherent sentence, let alone a paragraph, let alone a story. We had to
discontinue the Short Story contest, and the Creative Writing class at the high
school level similarly withered and died. In the college classroom as recently
as 2004, the students had great difficulty writing, unless they were older
students coming back to the community college to retrain.
Of some concern
to me was the survey that was printed with the article, a survey of 75 readers
who voted on the Best Award-winning novel of 2007. Sixty-two % of those who responded
believed that Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” deserved that distinction,
which it well may, based on its plot-driven story and theme.
The problem is
that Cormac McCarthy (who was shown often in the crowd at the Oscars as the
awards for “No Country for Old Men” rolled in) doesn’t much believe in the use
of traditional punctuation, particularly apostrophes. I realize that no less a
luminary than e.e. cummings similarly refused to capitalize, but picking “The
Road” only reinforces our drift, as a nation, towards anarchy, defined in this
case as a failure to even attempt to follow the rules of grammar and
punctuation.
Sometimes, we
veteran English teachers feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the
dike. We know that the dike will give way if we remove our finger, but what are
we to do? Language is constantly changing, yes. I am much more likely to use a
sentence fragment in a story I write, today, than I would have been twenty
years ago. Language is not set in stone and there are new words and terms and
techno-speak being added every day.
But some
appreciation for following the rules handed down by great writers seems wise. Poet e.e. cummings was an
exception that proved the rule, not a groundbreaker who made new ones. It will
be interesting to assess Cormac McCarthy’s effect on language from the
perspective of a decade hence.
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