NAAL stats

Sheida White, Mark Kutner, Elizabeth Greenberg, Ying Jin, Bridget Boyle, Yung-chen Hsu, Eric Dunleavy. *Literacy in Everyday Life: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy * Washington D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, 2007.

I want to look at this data because I think it shines a light on American literacy in a way theory cannot and because it helps me think about "literature" in terms of its social and political context.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) tested adult Americans on a specific set of literacy skills, which they saw as essential to participation in the economic and political life of the nation. They divided these skills into three categories: prose, document, and qualitative literacies. Prose literacy will be the only category of concern here, since it is the one that most directly relates to the reading of creative work.

NAAL defines prose literacy as follows:

Prose literacy. The knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts. Prose examples include editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials. (iii)

Adults who are tested for this type of literacy achieve a sore between 0 and 500. NAAL divided these scores into four "levels" of prose literacy: proficient, intermediate, basic, and below basic. Adults unable to respond to the questions were not scored and were considered "non-literate in English." I've excluded "below basic" since this group is essentially unable to read and understand novels, poetry, or drama in English.

Here is how NAAL defined each level, by skill set and by score:

Basic: reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts. Score: 210–264

Intermediate: reading and understanding moderately dense, less commonplace prose texts as well as summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose. Score: 265–339

Proficient: reading lengthy,complex,abstract prosetexts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences. Score: 340–500 (4)

To give a more precise understanding of what skills were involved at each level, NAAL published a gradation of types of skills, each assigned a score according to its difficulty. For example, whereas below basic readers could not explain the meaning of a metaphor in a narrative, comprehension of metaphor increased in each literacy level:

241 [basic] Explain the meaning of a metaphor used in a narrative.
304 [intermediate] Infer the meaning of a metaphor in a poem.
345 [proficient] Compare and contrast the meaning of metaphors in a poem. (5)

I don't think I'm alone in saying that I consider the ability to compare and contrast metaphors in a poem to be a basic, essential requirement for reading and understanding literary poetry, and that persons not possessed of this skill are not likely to possess the necessary skills to read literary prose either. Consider, for example, this passage from *Ulysses*, which Wayne Booth makes us of in his study *The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction*:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, *maestro di color che sanno*. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the *nacheinander*. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the *nebeneinander* ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, *nebeneinander*. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of *Los Demiurgos*. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

*Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?*

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: *deline the mare*.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. *Basta*! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end. (273-4 in Booth)

Booth recommends we read the passage aloud. He's right. It's lovely to hear. High modernism at its finest. And it is, not, I think, a stretch to say that the skill set require to read such a passage far exceeds the ability to compare and contrast metaphors. One must be much more than proficient to get anything from the passage at all, except, perhaps, a feel for the music. Here's Booth explaining his reaction to the text:

When as a nineteen-year-old I first read the passage, in my often baffled but exhilarated plunge through the novel, I felt completely out-classed. I had never read Aristotle or Aquinas or any other philosopher bald or hairy who grappled with this problem in this way; all I knew was that Stephen is troubled by some mysterious phrase, one that was meaningless to me...And I can remember looking up some of the strange words, and mumbling that mouth-filler: "ineluctable modality of the visible."...One must, in short, become at least a bit philosophical to be able to enjoy the passage at all...//

The possible effects are of course not confined to philosophical inquiry. I am asked, secondly, to mime "being learned."...Even if I can't catch many of the allusions, I will suspect that many allusions are being made—at least that phrase in Italian, if that *is* Italian, is an allusion to *something*, as is the "*Basta!*" Who *is* this "he," this "bald millionaire"? Who or waht is "Madeline the mare?"...

If I happen to recognize the quotation from *King Lear*, I will feel that I am a *little bit* learned, but I'll suspect that there are more allusions that I miss. And what does *nacheinander* mean? I may look it // up, if I happen to recognize that it's German. Or I may simply aspire to become the sort of person, someday, who knows languages and doesn't *have* to look it up. (274-6)

Booth's point it to explain how good literature can inspire a young man to become a better, more intellectual man—philosophical and learned. But we have to remember that he is already a young man capable of reacting so positively due to his early literacy experiences, shaped by the value placed on reading and writing in his family of origin, his early schooling, his experience in the Morman Church, etc. When nineteen-year-old Wayne Booth first read Joyce, he was already functioning at the high-end of proficiency, and Joyce came along to show him that reading could be so much more, that he as a reader could be so much more.

Consider the same passage as read by someone at a low-proficient or intermediate level. There is every chance that he or she will find the passage meaningless. Perhaps the lower-level reader will recognize in it some literary value. If so, he or she may feel intimidated, or challenged, or humiliated, or disenfranchised, or whathaveyou. But he or she will *not* likely feel the same kind or degree of inspiration as Booth. He was at the apex of measurable literacy skill, ready to take wing; average readers, at best, simply recognize a gulf of skill and learning that stands between them and understanding the text.

This raises a line of ethical consideration not taken up by Booth in his reflection on Joyce: What is the meaning of such a text to the general public? How many people are able to react like Booth? Who are they? How do they get to be at their level of skill? How is this skill distributed among readers? By who and according to what criteria? Yes, *Ulysses* is lovely, but for whom?

Here are the NAAL stats on levels of prose literacy across the entire US population:

Below Basic:
1992---14%
2003---14%

Basic:
1992---28%
2003---29%

Intermediate
1992---43%
2003---44%

Proficient
1992---15%
2003---13% (13)

So if 15-13 percent of the US populace is proficient, and a smaller portion of that group is "high proficient," meaning capable of getting something from artists like Joyce or Pynchon or whoever else you want to name that writes difficult prose, then we have to conclude that *Ulysses* is lovely for only a few.

Three hundred million Americans (give or take). Maybe five percent at what I'm calling "high" literacy (which, admittedly, was not a category measured by the NAAL, so I'm guessing here, and I think I'm being generous with that 5%). That still makes 15,000,000 potential Joyce readers in the US. Not a bad audience for him at all, really. Even at 1% (more likely) there's still 3M potential fans for his type of thing. But still, a vast majority excluded. 297,000,000 Americans Joyce leaves out of his conversation.

In her new collection of essays, Elif Batuman asks: "What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?" I want to answer that craft can't help but say something about the world, the human condition, the search for meaning. At all times, and in every way, craft is inextricably linked to such questions. Craft choices are choices from among social conventions, which themselves stand in relation to questions of equity, political questions concerning the relationship of the author to the reading (and non-reading) public. When an author makes craft choices, that author sets the terms of access to their text, including some readers, excluding some others. It is not possible to write an all-inclusive text, but this does not mean that as authors and as educators of future authors we should pretend that craft exists in a vacuum, apart from issues of race and class.

Here are the NAAL figures for average prose literacy score by race:

White
1992---287
2003---288

Asian/Pacific Islander
1992---255
2003---271

American Indian/Alaska Native
1992---254
2003---264

Black
1992---237
2003---243

Hispanic
1992---234
2003---216 (15)

The report acknowledges that "Hispanic" is an overly broad term, and then further breaks down that category by nation of origin, or ancestor's origin. Puerto Ricans were the only group that gained over the period.

Notice that no group is proficient on average (cut off for that level is 340) but, until 2003, only whites were intermediate on average (cut off 265). In 2003, whites were joined by the Asian/Pacific Islander grouping. All other groups are of basic proficiency on average. However, we should also note some significant gains in black and native populations. Inequality remains, and change is happening.

NAAL stats on the percent of adults at proficient or intermediate levels by race:

White
proficient
1992---18%
2003---17%
intermediate
1992---48%
2003---51%

Asian/Pacific Islander
proficient
1992---9%
2003---12%
intermediate
1992---36%
2003---42%

American Indian/Alaskan Native
proficient
1992---5%
2003---10%
intermediate
1992---35%
2003---41%

Hispanic
proficient
1992---5%
2003---4%
intermediate
1992---28%
2003---23%

Black
proficient
1992---2%
2003---2%
intermediate
1992---27%
2003---31% (16)

So, in 2003, when 68% of white adults were at intermediate or above, only 43% of black adults performed at the same level, and only 27% of Hispanics. Again, Puerto Ricans were the only group who gained over the period, with 44% of adults at intermediate or above in 2003.

An author who makes a choice to write complicated, beautiful, demanding prose, is an author who consents to exclude most Americans, including a disproportionate number of non-whites.

And, of course, money is a factor, too:

NAAL stats on average prose score by annual household income

<$10,000---229
$10,000-$14,999---237
$15,000-$19,999---244
$20,000-$29,999---257
$30,000-$39,999---268
$40,000-$59,999---282
$60,000-$99,999---303
$100,000 and up---316 (31)

That, I think, is a very impressive finding. Every increase in income bracket is an increase in prose literacy score.

Authors who aspire to write like Joyce also do so at the cost of excluding minorities and the poor.

The biggest objection I can think of to my reading of these stats is this: why should it be the author's job to set these things straight? Society is unfair, unequal; this is a question of social reform, not artistic integrity. If we were to take me seriously and attempt to write as inclusively as possible, it would mean the death of high literature in English and an impoverishment of our literary culture. Instead of asking authors to compromise their art, why not insist that society promote more minorities and more of the poor to "high proficient" literacy levels? Why not ask authors to help in this effort. In fact, Authors like Joyce, it could be argued, are the best advocates for the highest levels of literacy, since they show us what beauty can be achieved at those levels.

A good objection (if I do say so myself). And I can't disagree with it. Of course we should promote literacy more equitably. Of course we should not do anything to impoverish literary culture. We need Joyce. And we need more readers who can read Joyce. Absolutely.

So let me nuance my position a bit:
Authors who write in English for an American audience send their work out into the social realities of that audience. These authors have choices to make about audience. Who will read their work? What would they like their work to mean, do *do*, and to whom? As they consider these questions, they must have access to clear data about the realities of American literacy to guide them in their "craft" choices. All craft decisions, from genre to "level" of prose, are decisions that shape the potential audience for the work, including some and excluding others. Responsible participation in creative writing literacy requires that authors make their choices purposefully and address both form and content to the included recipients of their work.

The English Lit folks owe it to America to create more Wayne Booths. And especially more black, Latino Wayne Booths. Wayne Booths who are granted a leg-up from poverty.

We CW folks owe it to America to produce more black, Latino, poor James Joyces, yes. But also to create creative writers to are aware of and act as conscious participants in the social realities of American literacy.

Booth citation:
Booth, Wayne. *The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.* Berkley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

Ritter & Vanderslice: Can it really be taught?

Ed. Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice. *Can It Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy.* Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2007. Print.

Haake, Katherine. "Against Reading."

Haake presents a problem that reinforces Shelnutt's critique of CW status quo as taking power and effectively diminishing the quality of writing in America:

to the extent that we continue to proceed by presenting unproblematized literary models in our classrooms as a primary teaching strategy, we will work toward reinforcing already anachronistic twentieth century views of what counts as writing...Curiously, this remains the single sacrosanct element of our profession. Aren't we, after all, training our students to read us? It's not polite to say so, but if not them, who?...Students who emerge from such workshops...will have internalized some vague notion about what contemporary writing is supposed to look like, and in the best tradition of imitative pedagogies, will try to produce it. And this is precisely how we have earned our reputation for an MFA-homogenized // literature in what Patrick Bizzaro describes as a "...workshop-writing phenomenon [that] no doubt works vertically, where sameness is passed from teacher to student who, in turn, becomes a teacher who passes certain literary biases to yet another generation of students" (Bizzaro 305). (Haake 21)

Here's a sad outcome to an inspired assignment of "reading" the world:

I began to require that my students keep a "fact of the week" journal, utterly convinced that though many seemed dispassionate about, even uninterested in, the broader world, it would take little more than a glace to awaken their latent curiosities and vital sense of connection with [what] Bahktin has called the "open-ended present." But in the relative stability of post-earthquake, post-uprising L.A., my students were generally confounded by the assignment and had trouble finding even one fact in the whole world to command their attention and interest each week.

Today, that world is a vexed and altered one, and though it may not be the job of the creative writing teacher to tell the students how to think about that world, surely it should be to expect them to look at—to "read"—it. And as they do, they should ask hard questions about the role of writing in the particular world that turns out to be thiers, and how they would have their own work engage and move through it, defining their own intersection with history and what they would have their writing both *be* and *do* in it. (24)

That second paragraph is key. A great orientation for the CW workshop. Dovetails nicely into what I'm thinking of doing with literacy theory and CW.

LEADS: that bizzaro: "Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case for Creative Writing." *College English* 66.2:294-309.

Cross, Michelle. "Writing in Public: Popular Pedagogies of Creative Writing."

Cross presents a typology of popular CW pedagogies. That is, CW pedagogy as it appears in public. There are four: Literary, Commercial, Holistic, Iconic. Literary focuses on craft.

Commercial pedagogy:

focuses on literary texts in the context of a market-driven public culture. It implicitly conceives of creative writing as a vocation and of the writer as a professional labourer engaging in economic activity in an industry, more so than pursuing a path of artistic or spiritual self-discovery. As such, the lessons therein may vary in their specific suggestions for the craft of writing—from codified genre conventions to loose principles of plot and character development—but are linked in their explicit recognition of the market as having a palpable presence in and influence on the writer's life and work. (69)

You'd think she was describing Marxist analysis, and she may well include such analysis in this category, but Cross is mostly referring to tomes like *Writer's Market* and *How to Write Short Stories That Sell* etc.

Here's where she brings it home:

But despite its apparent vulgarity, commercial creative writing pedagogy may deserve credit for its lack of illusions, having looked at and engaged with the current literary publishing business for what it is—a profit-oriented industry—and having made the most out of it all the same. The industry has not changed, but has only become more massively corporatized, and the commandment that "thou shalt not be in it for the money" has served publishers better than writers...Like the myth of the hardworking immigrant, the fatalistic idea that 'good' literature will transcend the fate of the starving artist and prevail over the market is an attitude that serves to further naturalize the market-driven nature of the industry, and potentially propels unsuspecting aspiring writers into creative writing programs that do not properly credential students for professional survival, let along success, after graduation. (70)

Holistic pedagogy is all about self-discovery and echoes what Myers said about CW in its earliest from in American junior high schools:

[It] focuses on engendering a writing experience that contributes to the discovery, development, and healing of the writer's spiritual and emotional *self*, first and foremost...it values process over product, writing over literature, and individual concerns over social concerns. (70)

Iconic pedagogy is essentially the "star" system in the public sphere. Name authors write books about how they write, etc.

LEADS:
Epstein, Jason. 2002. *Book Business: publishing past, present, and future.* New York, NY: Norton.
She quoted him in her commercial pedagogy section to good effect. Something about "mass merchandise for the mall" on 105 and celebrity of authors on 19.

Vandenberg, Peter. "*Lore* and *Discipline*"

So many good things in such a small space....

It is a sad fact that when we complain about "theory," we are almost always complaining about something else—nominalizations, bald professionalism, myopia, professional turf-grabs, arrogance, elitism, and so on. We are rarely complaining about *a particular set of provisional concepts, definitions and propositions that, by specifying relations among variables, functions to explain and predict phenomena.*

to do so is to engage in theory, to be a theorist, rather than to simply complain.

What irritates us—even those of us who write and profess "theory"—is someone else who doesn't seem to share our language or location attempting to govern our understanding of "our" concepts, definitions, and propositions. *As an institutionalized practice,* the production and circulation of theory in textual form functions to empower some and disempower others. It is not theory, then, that threatens, but a particular, institutionalized *version* of theory-as-practice. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak—rejecting "theory" when one means to reject the authority of a particular institutional practice—tends to deny creative writing and its practitioners critical tools and a self-reflexive ethos.

While there is much of interest in discussions about the appropriateness of theory in and for creative writing, when such discussion reifies scholarly debate and dismisses it derisively as "theory," creative writing defines itself in opposition to critical inquiry. (107)

A nice, succinct rebuttal to the anti-theory folk. Thanks, Vandenberg.

He's also got some great stuff about "postprocess theory" and how he expects that CW theory will catch up to it someday soon.

The term "postprocess"

comes not from a desire to abandon a commitment to the writing act over the finished rhetorical artifact; rather, it signifies that there is too much to consider to remain fixated on the individual writer's act of composing.

and here he is on the future of creative writing theory:

A more self-consciously critical discourse of creative writing will most certainly refuse to continue bracketing conventionally defined literary genres, instead pulling them into a theory of relation with other writing practices and decidedly *un*literary text types. It also seems likely that these relations will be understood to be as they are because the circumstances in which writing is produced have an inevitably local and material dimension. To talk of creative writing as the product and preoccupation of a generalized and dislocated "workshop" will no doubt seem to explain less and less about what mean by *writing*. As has been the case elsewhere in English studies, creative writing will no doubt be increasingly studied as a function of the places where it is learned as well as where it is deployed; we are sure to hear much about creative writing as a *situated practice*. Signifying as it does an expanded attention beyond the individual writer's cognitive process, postprocess theory will open creative writing to the notion of positionality. (108)

Again, a nice tie-in to literacy theory and its application to creative writing. Strikes me that another solid hour or so of class discussion would flow from assigning this essay along with Harris's. Anti-theory process guy vs. pro-theory postprocess guy.

He gives an interesting example, applying Anis Bawarshi's work on first-year comp to the CW workshop. By examining "the syllabus, the written assignments, the margin notes and formal written comments developed by students in response to their classmates' work, and the teacher's informal and formal assessment" the postprocess analysis of the workshop finds that "the student's poem—as a response to an assignment sheet—is not only a poem in the conventional sense of a literary artifact but also a reflection of intention and subjectivity *organized by* particular relations specified by the genre set" (109).

LEADS: should look this guy up and see if he's written anything lately that expands on his application of postprocess to CW.

Literacy and CW

The paper I should have written last semester would have looked at bringing some of the insights from the discourse relating to issues of literacy over to the CW conversation. Creative Writing is still writing, even though it likes to pretend it belongs in a special class, apart from inventory lists and emails and such. Writing is writing, and the same (or at least many of the same) observations apply.

One way to approach this is to think about "creative writing literacy" as a type of literacy and to examine it as literacy has been examined generally. The questions at the end of Foucault's "What is an Author?" point toward this type of examination, in part.

Let me see if I can remember what I read:

We read Walter Ong on how writing transforms consciousness. If you take him at his word—and I think there is some of his argument that is salvageable without coming off like a bigot—then we could think about how that transformation affects storytelling and poetry. How does it change fiction, or, more appropriately, how we think fiction and poetry, to be able to write them down? How does it change the social dynamics of Creative Writing that it is no longer strictly an oral performance? Rereading him with these questions in mind might be productive. If speculative.

We read Brian Street and his Autonomous model vs. Ideological model of literacy. I'd have to reread to get exactly what the Autonomous model implied but the gist (as I remember it) is that anthropologists and others assumed that Literacy was a fixed thing, you had it or you didn't, and if you didn't you were less developed, less intelligent than cultures that did. The Ideological model suggests that literacy practices are multiple and are socially and economically determined. Street went to a rural town in Iran and looked at their literacy practices, demonstrating how they were related to economic changes in the region.

If we apply this to fiction, then we can say that the kind of fiction that gets written—the kind that gets published and read—is determined by social and economic forces as well. This takes us into Marxist critique territory. Was it Eagleton who said that literature is ideology? There may be some parallels to draw between these two. My choices as a writer, my freedom and success as a writer, are constrained by the economic and political conditions I face daily, including when I sit at the computer to write. How I write and who I write to are both choices that have economic and political consequences as well.

Brandt (Literacy in American Lives) interviewed 80 or so folks in Wisconsin for their personal histories with writing and found that these practices were very much determined by social and economic changes in America over the course of a century. Brandt's big concept was "sponsors" of literacy; she found that people who experienced success with literacy found favorable sponsors during the course of their lives, sponsors who introduced them to the writing skills necessary for success in a particular field.

The university has become a sponsor of creative literacy. It allows and also denies access to creative literacy practice. This is quite an impressive cultural power. Is the university the only sponsor of creative literacy? I'm quite sure it is the most powerful. The most widely influential. And so the discourse and practices in academic creative writing circles are now the very things that determine creative practice and written cultural production in the culture. We decide who gets to and who doesn't, and, perhaps more importantly, we decide why. The criteria we set for admission and success are standards we impose on the kinds of creative writing that happen in America.

Stuckey, who I didn't actually read but should, equated literacy with violence, suggesting that because literacy allows some access to privilege and denies others the same, and because access is unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, gender, that literacy itself is an oppressive force.
I gots to read this and draw on it. Seems like it would offer a serious critique of CW in the academy.

NAAL, The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, is mostly about reading skills, but it gives a good picture of who is capable of reading literary fiction. Not many people. And people who can are far more likely to be wealthy and white. So the choice to write literary fiction is a choice to write to a particular, privileged audience.

Gee's big idea was Primary and Secondary discourse. He also had a great, all inclusive definition of literacy. Primary discourse is what you get at home. Secondary discourse is what you have to pick up second-hand, and it is basically impossible to really fully acquire a secondary discourse. Middle class homes share a primary discourse with the educational institutions, so middle class kids take to the discourse at schools like fish to water. Lower class homes, minority homes, do not share the same discourse as their learning environments, and so are forever at a disadvantage in terms of gaining the literacy skills required to be successful in this economy.
Gee's stuff adds to the critique of CW in the academy, which by and large excludes lower class minorities from creative writing production.

His inclusive definition of literacy might make for an interesting examination of CW literacy. writing-reading-talking-feeling-thinking-believing...or something to that effect. It includes everything from body language to political views. What is the "literacy" of CW programs? What does it take to be a successful workshop participant? What are the unwritten, but still powerful, behavioral injunctions that guide workshop practice? We must examine these, since they represent more of what we actually teach than we realize; they, together, tell students: "A writer is someone who acts/thinks/speaks/critiques/writes/reads/gestures/positions him/herself like this."

The New London Group's pedagogy stated that literacy is not a singular thing. Multiliteracies was the term. And their approach to education was to go out into communities and ask what sorts of skills/knowledge people thought would be useful to them, and then they did their best to pass on those skills and/or that knowledge. Just came across a reference to a source from the 70s that suggested that CW students should be treated the same way. You find out what they want to do first, and then try to help them do it. Everyone who comes into the classroom has a different motivation, history, desired trajectory, etc. Each student has a different idea of what skills/knowledge would be useful and we could approach CW instruction as if it were a space where these resources are available rather than as a place where a particular aesthetic is imposed.

I know we read other stuff, but I'm going to have to go digging. And I'm not sure how to organize this and integrate it with the CW stuff I've been reading.