On 20 Feb 2007 at 13:57, dhbailey wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > The reason I believe the literacy level has dropped dramatically is > > my experience as an office temp for many years and seeing the bad > > grammar, misspelled words, limited vocabulary and lack of coherence > > in the thought processes of people my own age (54) and younger. The > > younger they get, the worse it seems to be. (Occaisionaly there are > > notable exceptions, but they are exceptions). At any rate, if you > > don't think there has been a decline in the literacy of Americans > > over the years, you can check the links below which report how low > > we are in the standings worldwide, and for a real shock, read some > > of the letters written on the Civil War battlefield by the > > "uneducated" blacksmiths, clerks, farmers, etc. who were wearing the > > blue and gray. They may only have had a rudimentary education (the 3 > > R's), but their prose is more coherent and literate than what I see > > and hear on the street these days. > > Of course the letters you read are those which were written. Consider > the many hundreds of thousands of soldiers who couldn't write and so > therefore there are no extant Civil War letters from them. Until the > percentage of extant Civil War correspondence and the number of > correspondents is compared against the total fighting force, the mere > existence of such letters proves nothing more than that there were > some literate and eloquent people among the soldiers.
I do think the level of literacy for the highly educated soldier was higher than today, but that may simply be because it was a more egalitarian army than we have today. I don't believe we have to many Joshua Lawrence Chamberlains serving in Iraq. > Think of how many other poorly written letters with bad grammar were > probably burned to start the next morning's fire. I'm also baffled at the basic assertion that the letters were literate. They were, I guess, literally so, since otherwise they couldn't have been written, but there are plenty of examples of quite poorly spelled and constructed Civil War letters. Flip through the companion volume to Ken Burns's Civil War series and there are plenty of examples. > All this griping about drops in literacy rates and other aspects of > civilized society is nothing new and one can go back to letters > written by Aristotle which decry the very same "end of civilization as > we know it" dumbing down of the younger generation and loss of > politeness and respect for elders, etc. I also think we've actually entered a new stage of *enhanced* literacy, because of the computer. Blogs and IM place a premium on written communication, and while both of these tend to a casual style, they are writing, nonetheless. I know that my daily participation posting in Usenet groups (and mailing list like this one) has greatly increased my ability to write something quickly. It's not prose for the ages and it may have some typos (because it's mostly unproofread, and even when it is, to tie up threads!), but the point is I've become accustomed to very quickly writing something in response to what someone else has said. This makes a certain kind of writing *very* much easier for me than it used to be. > But somehow we've managed to muddle through a few thousand years since > those complaining letters, and I'm sure we'll muddle through a few > thousand more, hydro-carbon-haze and melting ice-caps not > withstanding. I see these kinds of sky-is-falling claims as just situations where someone has just become away of Sturgeon's Law. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
