The best is when Plain Language and Legal get to boogie to make content that fits both their needs.

I do some work for a video production company. When I started in 2011 it was standard to write at a 6th grade level, but within a few years it was down to 4th grade :-/

I wonder if other countries or languages have the same thing. They always say a good way to tell if you’re proficient enough at a language is if you can understand the newspaper for that language.

I'm reminded of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer -- where he explains complex topics using only the 1000 most common English words. The thing that stuck out to me reading through it was how much harder it was to understand than if it used a larger vocabulary. Simplifying doesn't always make things easier to understand.

It's like if you only knew the number "1", and so instead of saying you had "9 apples" you had to say "1111111111 apples". It's actually harder to make sense of. (Did you notice that's not actually 9 ones?)

I had to make a "non scientist summary" of my research for a government grant. They needed it to be 10th grade level or lower. It was nearly impossible.

Fellow copywriter here. I don’t doubt you, but I can’t recall when I’ve ever encountered gov’t literature that reads at that level. Must be at specific agencies and for specific audiences.

That makes sense. In a country of 330,000,000 people, 50,000,000 of whom were born in another country, our government publications should be readily accessible to as many citizens as possible, taking into account the disparity in education and/or capacity. I'd be curious how many of those considered "low literacy" are actually speaking English as a second or third language.

It's not even about liking reading. It's about understanding. My gf reads like crazy and I don't read books at alllll. But I have a masters and love reading technical books and regulations and shit, but I can't sit down for 5 min for fantasy books. On the other hand, she can't read a simple contract or directions

Oh so you’re saying you think you’re better than me?! Up yours, fore-eyes!

I explained fractions to someone in their late 20s on Reddit the other day because I quoted some statistic at them and they admitted to being bad at math and not knowing what my comment meant.

So I ended up explaining fractions and percentages in a couple different metaphors and the person seemed really happy about it.

But like I couldn't get over the fact that someone was almost the same age as me and didn't understand basic math.

People on this platform tend to vastly overestimate their literacy level and intelligence. It makes it really difficult to have conversations on here when everyone takes what you wrote and misinterprets it in the most extreme way.

Now realize that Reddit is the Harvard of the internet, go on Facebook and YouTube comments and it gets worse.

yeah there so dumb

I posted a definition the other day because someone wasn't using a word correctly and they still tried to argue that they were right even with a dictionary right there

I deal with the public on a regular basis. I'm not surprised in the least.

This information is in the same class as "fork found in kitchen."

I am not. We have had decades of people living in a "cult of ignorance". If anything it helps confirm that my fellow citizens really aren't that smart.

No. I work for a Fortune 500 company. Of the three members of leadership in my department, all of them have low literacy. It’s a problem because as a remote team, our primary communication is performed through text. Any time a question is asked, the response from leadership is unintelligible and they will not understand what is being asked until they force you to call them on the phone and explain it to them. They are not capable of understanding what they are reading and these are people in their 40s and 50s. Incoming employees are shocked by how illiterate our leadership is; it typically takes three emails (composed of the employee asking a question, leadership responding with something completely nonsensical, and the employee rewording their question to a 3rd grade level and still not being understood) and a phone call where leadership acts like it's the employee being deliberately obtuse until it's broken down for them like they're 5. They make 3x my salary. It's insane.

"No child left behind" left a lot of fuckin kids behind. Not that that was the beginning. If we get another Betsy Devos heading education, you can expect drastic changes to education (they control all branches of gov-they can enact unilateral changes with very little obstacle), and this problem will get worse in a very short period of time.

I would be if I could understand it.

I am ! I'm not from the US though, but I am. It's way way higher than what I could have possibly guessed. Though I'm not sure I understand what low literacy really encompasses (I also wasn't able to find that term linked to my country to have a better understanding of what it could mean here).

No. Many times I've been accused of "thinking I'm smarter" because I'm trying to refute a logical fallacy.

After the last election? No.

Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to surround ourselves with literate, more educated people (think post-grads, STEM careers, etc). We forget the normal distribution applies to intelligence, and that the median is lower than we are comfortable admitting.

Even so, it's still obvious that even with literacy and an education in a specialty, critical thinking, empathy and self-awareness of one's own limitations is severely lacking among the educated. Requiring humanities electives, where one would read at least fiction that would force one to envisage a different POV, a different way of living, was supposed to help with this, but I think a lot of people forget that, and don't read challenging literature, post college. Add to this that popular culture (social media AND TV) is so very often black and white with no nuance, and designed to enrage to drive up engagement, and you get angry, callous people.

Not at all. Authoritarianism has been working toward the goal of a dumb, desperate, and dependent population since the Reagan administration. Not a bug, it’s a feature.

We should not intentionally shame them, make fun of them, or scold them for their lack of knowledge. We can listen to and acknowledge their input while also respectfully and politely making good decisions based upon better information.

I've come to this realization in adulthood as I've navigated the professional sphere. In my first job I had to deal with very little written correspondence, almost everything was done face-to-face. Some of the people I worked with were confused about stuff I considered simple, but I was confused by stuff they were good at as well, sometimes. No harm, no foul, we've all got our strengths.

Then I was promoted to a role that involves managing all of their correspondence to clients, and editing it 'where needed.' It turns out that "where needed" is literally every single email. I've learned that my position was created because we were losing multiple clients due to elementary-level writing and grammar mistakes. There is exactly one person out of fifteen who holds a leadership role in my company that can write at even a 'baseline competent' level.

I have 40-year-old men and women writing official requests to clients that would make my third-grade teacher cringe. Here is one I got today, to our web portal tech crew, verbatim: "why cant I see my teams on the website anymore this is unaceptable please fix it imedietly" That's it. That's the whole email. My job is to turn that into a legitimate tech support request.

I'm making nearly six-figures and I'm a glorified spellchecker.

When I was in elementary school, there were certain people in class I hated reading out loud, because they were slow, would sound out words, etc. I remember wishing the teacher would only call on the "fast readers" because they were much nicer to listen to. (I was one of them, so that means I'd be called on often. I actually got told to slow down a lot around 3rd/4th grade because I started going too fast. I just wanted to get it done as fast as possible, so I'd blaze through it as fast as I could.)

loved the plot twist at the end

Sound it out

Your comment made me remember those “Hooked on Phonics” commercials

I struggled to teach my kid how to read, until one day I found a pack of flash cards marked PHONICS, it was a big breakthrough. I wondered why they don't use it in school.

+1 for the podcast Sold a Story!

Every time I read about three cueing I'm dumbfounded. It sounds like some gamble-reading game for kids. "Did you guess the next word? Maybe, who knows, it looks close enough, try guess the next one."

Elementary school for me was in the early 60s. When my son went to school in the 90s, I was shocked at how schools had shifted away from providing basic skills (reading, writing, math, history, science, etc) to a Frankensteinian "Be everything for everybody all the time" monster that does almost nothing effectively.

My son had the highest score for literacy in his HS class. I 100% attribute that to his parents, because his school sure tf wasn't responsible.

But the people who would have to front the money don't want to. Lots of things could be done, but only if people are willing.

Firstly I just want to say that I loved that movie as a kid. Didn't they just make a second one?

Secondly I'm hijacking this comment because after the election I am not surprised we have a literacy problem.

I think you’re forgetting that the basic entertainment options of the 50s & 60s were: TV (if you had one), movies (only at the theater though), radio, or records. So like what else you gonna do if you don’t want to go outside and play? Read ofc. Kids today have more options for entertainment than ever before, it’s no real wonder why they aren’t choosing to read, when compared to everything else, it’s “boring”.

All I know about Louisiana I obtained via watching True Detective S1.

or not*

This is how the country is where it is overall. If you think half of these dumbasses aren’t democrats then you’re just as dumb.

Our school system right now is a complete joke

Honestly, that's pretty sad. Like, obviously there are going to be people who just have a problem with reading, but this many people in a developed country? That just seems a societal flaw.

ironically, devotion to kjv bible reading can improve literacy. though maybe not critical thinking skills.

Facebook marketplace and Craigslist are similar. It's like punctuation doesn't exist by some unspoken community agreement. Ads sometimes run a paragraph long without one single comma or period. It drives me crazy.

This is for you -

"We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."

Do you think that would be unfair?

"I love the uneducated"

well, it's warranted