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.
I have worked as a
The issues you list definitely should affect the way documentation and training are presented to users. I would love to see more writers adopt a strategy of using less words and more graphics and videos, especially now that technology is making this easier and easier. However, I would emphasize that these tools do not eliminate the need for well-thought-out structures and designs. Sometimes the clients of technical writers and instructional designers jump at graphics and videos, but don’t resource them properly and the results convey less information than the paragraphs they were intended to replace!
By the way, I enjoyed reading Chris Hedges book too, and the frightening descent of literacy is something that needs to be dealt with in our society. It also makes me wonder a little bit as well, if our society gets addicted to easily digestable information, in the forms of tweets and videos and podcasts and videos, will that also help continue the downward slide? Neil Postman had lots to say about this…
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the post.
I agree with you that often companies love the idea of online videos but underestimate the amount of time to create them. On more than one occasion, I’ve worked with employees who are new to a tool like Captivate. Meaning well, they create lengthy, detailed videos that may fully explain a feature. When the videos were localized, however, everyone was shocked at the huge effort required to coordinate the translation of these videos.
I’m glad you enjoyed Hedges’s book as well.
I found the main theme of “Empire of Illusion” to be that we are losing our freedoms to the rise of sociopathic corporations in America’s war economy. The decline in literacy allows the manipulation of an uninformed public who will not read to understand and question what the mass-media presents to them.
If you are interested in reading more about the decline of democracy and the American Empire, I highly recommend Chalmers Johnson’s “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”.