As an author, I have a particular interest in whether or not people are reading. As a member of society in general, though, the frustration runs much deeper than just “why aren’t people buying books?”
The Old Illiteracy
When I was a teenager, I worked as a cashier in a small grocery store. I specifically remember a woman, we’ll call her Kathy, who was a regular customer and a very nice lady. She cashed checks in the store from time to time, and she could only sign her name on the back by thinking very hard then drawing the letters by memory.
Kathy was illiterate. Genuinely, completely, illiterate—to the extent that she did not know how to spell her own name other than as a series of memorized shapes.
That wasn’t super common in the 1980s, but it certainly did happen, especially in poor neighborhoods like where that store was located. I admit, Kathy was the only person I ever witnessed being incapable of writing even her own name effectively, but she was not the only illiterate person I met. I actually worked as a literacy volunteer in the early ‘00s; it was a very real, very widespread, problem.
Fast forward to today, and I think that sort of thing is rare. Granted, I no longer work with the public and don’t have cause to discover whether random people I encounter out in the world can read or write, but I find it unlikely anyone makes it even into mid-childhood without that basic skill. Why?
Because of our phones.
A New Relationship With Text
Texting has taken the place of phone calls almost exclusively for many—if not most—of us. And most people spend a significant portion of every day scrolling one social media platform or another. Kids today grow up with a keyboard in front of them the way kids of my generation grew up with a 64-pack of Crayolas.
But does that mean everyone is literate now? I don’t think so.
Sure, pretty much everyone can get their point across via keyboard and screen by a young age these days, but that doesn’t mean they can spell. It doesn’t mean they know when to use a capital letter, what any punctuation marks mean. I work in an office setting, where you’d think people would be expected to have excellent written communication skills, but that isn’t the case. A co-worker of mine once received an email from his manager, commenting on a customer compliment he received. Her email, sent to their entire team, said, “You are Office!” (Which I can only assume happened because she tried to spell “awesome” with an O then trusted Spellcheck to fix it without proofreading the final email before hitting send.) I’ve worked with many people over the years who had to ask me how to write an email, despite being able to scroll and post all day long on Facebook.
Speaking of social media, my only such hangout is Bluesky. One of the more prevalent groups on there is academics, and I’ve seen more than one college professor lament that their incoming classes “can’t” read. Not that they don’t know how, but that they lack the focus and broad comprehension to ingest even short reading assignments. I recently saw a professor lamenting that she has a 20-page article she assigns every year and that, this year, not a single student in her class was able to finish it.
I feel like we’ve entered a new era of illiteracy—one in which people can still get their basic point across to one another using written text, but where a growing number of people lack the larger skills of spelling, grammar, and reading comprehension. (And yes, grammar rules can be fraught with cultural bias and other problems, but being able to line up a noun and a verb shouldn’t be an insurmountable task.)
Not Really Reading
I saw a video by YouTuber Caelan Conrad giving a very entertaining rant about BookTok. If you’re not familiar, BookTok is, as the name implies, a community on TikTok where people post about books. I’ve heard about it as an indie author, but I don’t use TikTok myself so hadn’t seen any of the actual posts. But from what Caelan showed… yikes!
Reading as many books as possible has become trendy, not just on TikTok. I see “reading goals” on Goodreads, too, and elsewhere online. And, I mean, it’s good to have a goal to read more, but it’s becoming clear that many of the people with the sky-high reading goals don’t quite grasp what it means to read a book.
This isn’t entirely new. My best friend as a teenager was a very fast reader. She looked down her nose at me for reading more slowly and scoffed at people who took longer than 2 days to finish a book. We normally read very different things (me horror, her historical romance) but we occasionally did overlap, such as with Anne Rice.
One time, we decided to both read the same book simultaneously: a biography of Marilyn Monroe. It took her half a day, it took me over a week. And she scoffed, as usual, until she realized how much more I’d gotten from the book than her. She re-read it, more slowly this time, and discovered there were spots where she’d flipped past as many as four pages at a time* without even noticing the text didn’t line up. She wasn’t reading those books that fast—she was skimming them.
Which isn’t great, but it’s apparently gotten much, much worse. Caelan’s YouTube video highlights people on BookTok who say they don’t read prologues. Now, as a writer, I’ve heard my share of anti-prologue sentiment, mostly from other authors, but I have never heard what seems to be a common cry on BookTok: “if it was worth reading, it would be in the book.” Because, apparently, a lot of people don’t know the difference between a prologue and a preface? To say something in the book isn’t “in the book” is a weirdly telling statement.
They seem to feel the same way about epilogues—thinking they’re “extra content,” and not part of the core story. People seem to be treating prologues and epilogues like deleted scenes in DVD bonus content.
Another common one is people who only read the dialogue. I won’t pretend some books don’t go overboard on long, dense, descriptive passages but, if the book in front of you has those, then that’s the book you’re reading. I can only assume this one comes from watching movies and TV shows. As someone who writes books intentionally meant to evoke the vibe of a TV show, I get it; but a piece of written media doesn’t include the visuals of a show. All those words are how you know where the characters are, what they’re doing, and what’s going on around them. You can’t read a novel like it’s a play or a movie script if you want to have any idea what’s going on.
Just a Phase?
The first true dictionary of the English language wasn’t published until 1755, with the Oxford English Dictionary not appearing until 1884. Until then, people spelled things phonetically, in whatever way seemed reasonable to them. Once the printing press came into play, it got even more complicated, with printers adding extra letters just to make words long enough to fill the lines out neatly. This is a lot of why you see variable spellings like “shop” vs. “shoppe,” and “old” vs. “olde.”
To us, rigid spelling and grammar rules seem obvious, as most of us were taught them in elementary and middle school. But, in the broad scheme of history, they haven’t been around all that long. Will the past hundred and fifty years or so turn out to be just a temporary phase in the evolution of written communication? Will people in another hundred years talk about that “weird period” in the history of English when “people got carried away with things like spelling, capital letters, and punctuation?”
Did you know Ancient Egypt, the source of one of the word’s richest polytheistic mythologies, switched to monotheism for a couple of decades in the 14th century BCE? Maybe a concern for grammar rules and spelling are English’s Atenism?
I hope not. I do believe some of the rigidity in “da rules” needs to evolve to be more inclusive of various cultures and neurologies, but that doesn’t mean we should drop them all together. I agree with the decision to stop teaching cursive handwriting in schools, but if we stop teaching reading and writing all together, then our history will, ultimately, be lost. Archaeologists and linguists have had to work so hard to decipher ancient writing forms: do we really want to let our own become lost to history in the same way? Do we want the future historians to pick apart our writings only to ultimately discover our language skills deteriorated because we said, collectively, “eh, fuck it?”
I admit to being an English grammar nerd, but this isn’t me just wanting to push my particular brand of nerdery onto others. Communication is important. And, while we chatter online at one another all day, every day, I feel like actual communication is losing its meaning.
But TL;DR, right?
*For those who’ve read Between the Worlds, yes, this is EXACTLY where I got Isaiah’s tendency to do the same page-skipping nonsense!
