Are we as a society getting dumber? If not, why are so many of our books written as if we are?
We have a seventh grade Canadian history textbook at home from maybe about 15 years ago. It's written at a level that you would expect 12-year-olds to understand, is interesting, and has graphics and pictures but is not too heavy on the flash. Recently my wife saw a second edition of the same textbook in the library. Same title, same grade level – totally different book. It was about 30 percent thinner, with a lot less writing and a whole lot more pictures, many of a cartoonish nature.
Why? Are 12-year-olds losing their ability to concentrate on text? If that's the case, are we doing them any favors by steadily asking them to do less and less?
Will we start making football fields shorter next, or eliminating sharps and flats from music? No doubt that would have made music easier for me as a kid, but would it help promising musicians to reach their potential? What would the orchestras of the future sound like? And how would they play all the great music of the past – or the present, for that matter?
Obviously, we're not going to do these things – our society is hard-wired not to coddle athletes (at least when they're on the field), and the music industry will always have high expectations for those who seek to join its ranks.
So why don't we have the same attitude when it comes to reading?
Even many adults now are reading graphic novels. I don't get it, frankly. Not everybody loves reading, but when I was younger everybody knew how – even the guy I met on a school ski trip who proudly proclaimed he had never read a book that wasn't assigned to him knew HOW to read.
I don't understand why a reader needs to have page after page of what, to me, is essentially very grown-up cartoons in order to follow a story.
A hundred years ago, eight-year-olds were reading books that are now considered too challenging for 12- and 13-year-olds. They were reading the unabridged, unexpurgated stories of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. They were reading Dickens. In fact, when Dickens was writing, an important segment of his audience was people who had enough education to read but not much more. Now people don't read Dickens until university, if at all.
Personally, I don't think great writers like Dickens, Twain and Shakespeare are beyond the understanding of any teen who doesn't have a specific developmental delay. Shakespeare might require a little hand-holding due to the archaic language, but not a ton.
What they do, perhaps, require is the ability to concentrate. And maybe this is where we're failing our kids and ourselves. When I was growing up, TV commercials were 30 or 60 seconds. They were sometimes mini-dramas in their own right. Now they're often just 10 or 15 seconds and they hit you over the head with their message. Not that I'm advocating more or longer commercials, but something has definitely changed in our brains whereby many of us don't seem willing or able to concentrate on anything requiring a time or mental commitment.
When this happens, those who do have the ability to focus on a task for longer periods will have a definite edge in the workforce. Will you be one of them?
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Out with the Old?
As I've mentioned before, English is a constantly-evolving language, and this is one of the things that keeps it vibrant and growing. By some estimates, there are upwards of 600,000 words in the English language.
That being said, you would be hard pressed to find someone familiar enough with even a 10th of these words to use them in everyday conversation. Some words are timeless, changing little in pronunciation or meaning over the centuries. For instance, right now I'm reading a book entitled, Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music (I highly recommend it, by the way). Every single word in this title means exactly what it meant when it first entered the language.
Other words have been around for a long time, but their meanings have changed over the years, some more than once. For instance, according to the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins, passion used to mean suffer, specifically the suffering of Christ on the cross. Sometime around the 16th century it came to mean strong emotion, often of a sexual nature. Terse used to mean smooth. Glamor was originally an alternative pronunciation of grammar. Later it came to mean enchantment, and only in the 19th century did it acquire its current meaning.
Then there are the words that still exist but that nobody uses, like “wherefore.” It's a good thing nobody uses it, because very few of us would use it properly. It means “why,” not “where.” When Juliet pleads, “wherefore art thou Romeo?,” what she means is, “why did I have to fall in love with a Montague?” We still use “typewriter,” but we're going to use it less and less as fewer and fewer of us remember what they were.
It's very important to make sure you and your audience are speaking the same language. A lot has been said and written about the younger members of the workforce – how they perceive work, how they want to interact with their managers, etc. People who work in employee communications need to take these preferences into account when communicating to younger workers. On the other hand, they can't ignore the needs of older workers either.
Perhaps for the first time we're seeing people acknowledging a variety of age demographics when communicating internally. In the past, the organization spoke with one voice in just a small number of official communications channels, such as newsletters, memos and (later) emails. Now the organizations with the most engaged and informed employees are using multiple channels to get their messaging out.
They're still sending all-staff emails, and there's no reason to stop this practice anytime in the near future, but forward-looking organizations are using other tools as well. They're holding video conferences, their leaders are blogging – and posting comments in real time, and managers are going into the field to speak with employees where they work. That's not exactly high-tech, but it's effective.
In the end, what matters is not what channels you use, whether you're on Twitter or have fully integrated Web 2.0 into your intranet. What matters is that you're considering all of your audiences and are using the most effective means available to engage them. And that means, in part, speaking to them in language that they understand and feel comfortable with.
That being said, you would be hard pressed to find someone familiar enough with even a 10th of these words to use them in everyday conversation. Some words are timeless, changing little in pronunciation or meaning over the centuries. For instance, right now I'm reading a book entitled, Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music (I highly recommend it, by the way). Every single word in this title means exactly what it meant when it first entered the language.
Other words have been around for a long time, but their meanings have changed over the years, some more than once. For instance, according to the Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins, passion used to mean suffer, specifically the suffering of Christ on the cross. Sometime around the 16th century it came to mean strong emotion, often of a sexual nature. Terse used to mean smooth. Glamor was originally an alternative pronunciation of grammar. Later it came to mean enchantment, and only in the 19th century did it acquire its current meaning.
Then there are the words that still exist but that nobody uses, like “wherefore.” It's a good thing nobody uses it, because very few of us would use it properly. It means “why,” not “where.” When Juliet pleads, “wherefore art thou Romeo?,” what she means is, “why did I have to fall in love with a Montague?” We still use “typewriter,” but we're going to use it less and less as fewer and fewer of us remember what they were.
It's very important to make sure you and your audience are speaking the same language. A lot has been said and written about the younger members of the workforce – how they perceive work, how they want to interact with their managers, etc. People who work in employee communications need to take these preferences into account when communicating to younger workers. On the other hand, they can't ignore the needs of older workers either.
Perhaps for the first time we're seeing people acknowledging a variety of age demographics when communicating internally. In the past, the organization spoke with one voice in just a small number of official communications channels, such as newsletters, memos and (later) emails. Now the organizations with the most engaged and informed employees are using multiple channels to get their messaging out.
They're still sending all-staff emails, and there's no reason to stop this practice anytime in the near future, but forward-looking organizations are using other tools as well. They're holding video conferences, their leaders are blogging – and posting comments in real time, and managers are going into the field to speak with employees where they work. That's not exactly high-tech, but it's effective.
In the end, what matters is not what channels you use, whether you're on Twitter or have fully integrated Web 2.0 into your intranet. What matters is that you're considering all of your audiences and are using the most effective means available to engage them. And that means, in part, speaking to them in language that they understand and feel comfortable with.
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