With such high lev­els of func­tion­al illit­er­a­cy in North America—some esti­mates peg the num­ber at about 42 per­cent of the total population—what impli­ca­tions do num­bers like this have on pro­fes­sion­al communicators?

In his book Empire of Illu­sion, author Chris Hedges shares some star­tling sta­tis­tics about illit­er­a­cy in Cana­da and the U.S:

• About 27 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are unable to read well enough to com­plete a job appli­ca­tion, and 30 mil­lion can’t read a sim­ple sen­tence. There are some 50 mil­lion peo­ple who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade lev­el. Near­ly a third of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion is illit­er­ate or bare­ly literate.
• A third of high-school grad­u­ates nev­er read anoth­er book in their lives, and nei­ther do 42 per­cent of uni­ver­si­ty grads.
• In 2007, 80 per­cent of the fam­i­lies in the U.S. didn’t buy or read a book.
• Cana­da has an illit­er­ate and semi­lit­er­ate pop­u­la­tion esti­mat­ed at 42 per­cent of the whole, a pro­por­tion that mir­rors that of the U.S.

Giv­en these sta­tis­tics, does it always make sense to churn out book-cen­tric user guides and help systems?

As always, it depends on your audi­ence. But I believe that writ­ers will need to embrace oth­er tech­nolo­gies to con­vey mes­sages. Some ideas:

• Using sites like Twit­ter to com­mu­ni­cate key mes­sages in 140 char­ac­ters or less.
• Cre­at­ing how-to demon­stra­tions and videos with voiceovers may become the norm.
• Deliv­er­ing Pod­casts for explain­ing some prod­ucts and concepts.
• Tak­ing advan­tage of social media sites to fos­ter dia­log with customers.
• Writ­ing con­tent for a three-inch screen, as con­sumers con­tin­ue to snap-up smart phones, such as Black­ber­rys and iPhones.