With all the hype going around about this literacy thing I've heard so much about I figured I'd give it a whirl. Besides, illiteracy apparently looks bad on a newsman's résumé.
So instead of just banging on the keys willy-nilly and letting my spel chuck program determine both my speling and my meaning, I figured I'd start moving towards actually inputting my meaning directly.
On first impression it seemed very easy. The pictures are all very comely and much of the meaning can be derived from the bullet points, slogan quotes and diagrams. Upon further effort, however, it gets exponentially more difficult.
I'm looking at the characters in these educational textbooks like Glamour and GQ, trying to figure out what the words say, and it all looks Chinese to me. Squares with squiggles, stick men with three arms and a funny hat, even off-count tic-tac-toes with odd borders. I can't make heads, tails or torsos out of one bit of it.
I'd thought there were only 26 characters in our language. It's strange to me because there's so much more to it when it comes to these uppity publications that pander to the super-intelligent.
For now I'm resigning myself to my old method of data entry, where I just go hog wild on the Qwerty and let Word pick up the pieces. And why not, that's what all the big papers do.
Article appears courtesy of Perplexing Times.
