The Rotary Club speaker today was from Reading Connections. What caught my attention was a quote from Robin Britt, that “From zero to eight, we learn how to read, and from eight on we read to learn.” According to the U.S. Department of Education, an incredible 14% of Americans – a whopping one out of 7 and a total of 32 million adults – are illiterate in this country. To identify with that is like, the speaker said, think about your travels to an Asian or Arabic country where you can’t read the signs, the menu or labels. Pretty humbling … and disorienting.
The difference is that when you or I travel in a foreign land and can’t read the signs, we feel no shame. Those who are illiterate feel negatively about themselves. They feel failure.
Low literacy also costs $73 million per year in terms of direct health care costs. A recent study by Pfizer put the cost much higher. Michelle Carlson, Ph.D., the associate director of the Center on Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore found that teaching reading skills is one of the best ways to save an aging brain in her study titled the Experience Corps Trial. The study involves older men and women volunteering to teach reading skills to kindergarten through third graders in Baltimore city schools. Using brain-imaging studies, Carlson and her colleagues have shown that after just a few months, people who volunteer show beneficial changes in their brains similar to those that other research teams have seen with exercise.
Most of us take reading for granted. Consider how true it is with the internet. We search by reading. We pop in and out of conversations, on and off websites, depending on how well written it is. Can we find what we are looking for easily? Is it easy to understand? Do they come to the point quickly? Do they provide all the information that I am seeking?
In a world of slang in texting, tweets and instant messaging, reading is still the foundation.
I left the Rotary meeting with a greater appreciation for just how important it is to be able to read, and as a marketer, how essential it is to write directly and clearly. How important is reading to you?
