Response to Szwed's Article

My literacy practices mainly include pleasure, education, and everyday life.  We wouldn’t be able to survive without some type of literary practice and that’s why literacy is so important.  Something that I really thought to myself about while reading Szwed’s article is, is literacy actually declining or is it just presented in a different way?  I think literacy is just presented in a different way with the use of technology and the Internet.  People may not buy as many books, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t reading.  We have so many other ways that we can now access literacy and it is easier to access. 

Literacy is very important because we use it everyday to survive, whether we realize it or not.  We are reading signs and communicating each and everyday.  Communication has been made easier by recognizable signs, like Szwed presented, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t reading.  On page 427 Szwed talked about literacy appearing not to be needed in our day-to-day lives anymore, however I strongly disagree.  I think it has been made easier for all people to be able to function instead of making all people learn how to adapt.  This doesn’t mean that our children don’t need to learn how to read and write.  They definitely do! It’s one of the most important things they will learn and will use it everyday!

A big thing that stood out to me in this article is that it is very hard to measure literacy.  The more I got to thinking about this the more I agree.  There really is no way to measure literacy.  I don’t even know how I would be able to go about measuring literacy partly because everyone learns differently and at different paces.  Society has been made so that everyone can participate and survive, however, we should still take the initiative to better ourselves and educate our children on reading and writing.  We need to emphasize how important literacy is.

I found it interesting that the author thinks literacy is declining, because I think it is just changing and we aren’t used to the change.  Technology has a huge part to do with the change, but I don’t think it is a bad change.  Literary pieces are now easier to access, we just need to keep teaching our children about literacy so they can access these pieces and better their education.  I also feel that everyone needs to work together to achieve some type of literacy.  Something that shocks me about literacy practices is using it as punishment.  We should never punish a child with reading or writing, because we want them to enjoy these things.  Giving them this type of punishment is the worst thing we could do to our children, it discourages them from enjoying literary practices.  It is more important now than ever that we emphasize how important literacy is and how valuable your education is!