Wherever I look lately, there seems to be dire warnings about our declining literacy skills. With the digital presence looming like a third person in every room, the view appears to be that the texting, posting and tweeting world is rendering us incapable of stringing a logical sentence together.
Regardless of the city you're in, this scene will be familiar; people, heads bent down, madly tapping into screens, updating their statuses and texting friends. Like no other point in history, written communication is the driver for virtually all social and increasingly, business contact. Written communication.
When I was young, I rarely wrote to anyone. There was the odd Christmas or birthday card and the occasional grovelling letter, admitting to some nefarious deed or other, stuck under my parents' bedroom door. I think I may have attempted a pen friend type arrangement, at one point too but that was pretty much the extent of it. My children write constantly. Constantly. They text, they email, they post. They take the words out of their heads and letter by letter, frame their thoughts into writing. Granted, it's not poetry but it is words and only the literary snobs would deny the value in that.
The biggest threat to literacy skills comes not from the changing mediums for communication but from the erosion of enjoyment people get from writing. When children sit in classrooms across the country and are told what to write, essay upon essay, only to be critiqued without guidance, they aren't being taught the more important lessons about writing-the how and the why. We need to be teaching our children that their experiences, the way they hear things and the way they in turn express things, are unique and that they have value. Every time high school teachers read novels aloud to their class or mark work with comments like, 'This isn't how I would write it', they are missing this crucial point.
Of course we need to teach the basic principles of writing; spelling, punctuation and grammar but these are only parts of the puzzle. So next time you see someone typing on a screen, don't cringe. Words are being written. They may not be written in a way you would like but they are being written.
If we want to encourage the next generation to value writing, in whatever form it comes, we need to relax the 'rules'. Give people the freedom to find their voice and the confidence to express themselves because it's only through this that our next wave of writers will be born.