Blog 1: Leslie

Hello everyone. I am Leslie Anderson, a Junior at Chico State. I am an English Education major and hope to become a teacher. I am from a really small town (population 190 people) called Lemon Cove, CA. I attended Long Beach State for two years right out of High School and even though I loved it, I was tired of LA County and southern California so I transferred to Chico last semester. So far I have enjoyed it here. I work at La Hacienda Mexican Restaurant, if any of you know where that is.

As I read Szwed  I compared my literacy to what he was saying. But now that I think about it, I am not a good example of many of things he was talking about because like the rest of you in this class, I am interested in English. We all read and write much more than people, so of course our literacy and our opinion on literacy is formed by our experience as English majors. For me, I enjoy reading books assigned in class, and I often write stories, poems, etc. for fun. So I am using formal-style literacies often. When I ask my non-English major friends about reading they have a whole different take on it. The boys normally laugh and tell me they have never actually finished a  novel and if I ask them what they write, their answer is either the bare necessity of school or work. Girls often have read slightly more, but still not much and much of their writing is letters, social media stuff, blogs, etc. that are written informally. So I realized I am not a good representation of literacy within my age group. But I wouldn’t say any of those people are less literate than I am, we just have different forms of literacy.

In my generation or age group right now there is a mix of literacy styles, ranging from very traditional and formal to text and internet speak style literacies. For the most part, we all know both styles, even if we rely more heavily on one than other. But I begin to wonder, if lacking one or the other makes us illiterate. Maybe the new form of literacy is being able to use both. Are older and technology challenged people considered illiterate because they cannot read something in text speak? And are young, computer-savvy kids illiterate because they can know the meaning of lol without second thought but can’t actually read the words laugh out loud? This article really made me think about literacy and consider the changes being made to it all the time. Then again, I pick up a classic novel and sometimes struggle to understand the meaning because words have changed and structure revised. To the standards of that time, I would be illiterate but clearly in today’s world thats not the case anymore. So change in what we define as literate has been changing over time, but the transition stage, (our generations experience) is that one that struggles most to understand literacy.

I agree with other people in class who say that the basis of being literate is our ability to communicate effectively with one another. As long as there is some commonality that we can all make sense of, then we are literate enough. But personally, I struggle to understand if that is ever possible because I speak, write and read in a language that is the same as my family, friends, and boyfriend, and even though we are all literate we misunderstand each other constantly, we get totally different understandings of the same novel and we write in totally different styles. Of course, the basic meanings of words are all agreed on and understood but just because we are all literate by standard definition doesn’t mean we can communicate effectively or really understand each other. I know this last paragraph was totally off topic, but I just started thinking about this and wrote it down.  Hope that’s okay.