Who Do We Think We Are Talking To?

How many times do we see something that we want to read? Maybe it is a note from our children's school. The nurse may give us a paper about some tests we need. We see a poster at our job about new safety rules or working hours. We get a letter in the mail about our pension, our citizenship or our family allowance checks.

A lot of this kind of information is hard to understand. Even when we understand what the words say, we may not understand what they mean. We may be able to read the words, but still not know what we are supposed to do.

If we read well, we can most likely work it out in the end. If we can not read well, then we may be in trouble. After a while, we may decide to stop trying to understand the words and to figure out what is happening some other way.

When we cannot read well enough to make sense out of the information that we are given every day we may be called "functionally illiterate." People in the government, in business and the schools then talk about "the literacy problem." And it is true that many women want to read and write better. We know that we can not have the kind of life we want unless we improve our skills.

Many other women work in literacy programs, in community services, in unions and as teachers to help learners with reading and writing. I am one of these women. I work as a tutor, as a writer and I do research for a literacy council.

So - I am one of those people who work with “the literacy problem.”

I also work with another problem - "the readability problem." Here, I look at how people write the information that we want or need to read. I look at how they do not seem to pay attention to the real lives of their readers.

When the school teachers write notes for children to take home, when hospitals write instructions for medical tests, when work managers write safety notices or the government people send out letters - they do not seem to think about who they are talking to.

They write as if everyone has a lot of education and understands how things like schools and governments work. They write as if everyone is white, speaks English, has money, a job, a safe house to live in and an easy way to get to their offices.

So when I try to work with other women on this problem, I am trying to help people learn how to use clear language -language that most people can understand. I try to make people who write see what happens when they write in a way that many people cannot understand.

They do not get their message across. They make other people feel angry and stupid. They keep all their information for themselves and for other people just like them. They do not share what they know. They stop other people from learning what everyone needs to know.

It is one thing to write to a special friend, or a person who does the same kind of work that we do, or to our teacher. Then we can write any way that this other person understands. Even if no one else understands what we say, we will still get our message across to the person we want to talk to.