I ran into a flustered Nick Earls on Thursday, I think, with a young child stuck to his side, rushing through the State Library of Queensland bookshop that had spilled out onto the surrounds, leaving a bottleneck at the signing tables and flocks and flocks of little people spilling and spiralling in clumps and lines, following amicably or pack herded. We only had a brief chat, but I had to ask myself - do I call him Nick or Mr Earls (could he also be a Doctor?)? I had just finished Welcome to Normal, his recent short story collection and I let him know how much I had enjoyed it, especially as I now look at my own material for short story development. The child dazed, slipping from his grasp, Nick smiled at me, thanked me, nodded, and then, with minder at elbow, he allowed himself to be guided through the munchkin throng, piles of books clutched in their little arms.
Although I hated the noise, the sticky fingers, the darting little imps under foot, I loved seeing them there babbling about the books, excited with finding something awesome, arguing about the characters, whose favourites where whose. I don't have kids, but one day I hope to, and I would have delighted in taking them myself to such an event... and in this, I disagree with Germaine. The fun for me remains in meeting people and talking about their ideas, from which all good books come. Fun is the spark of 'What if?' that is vital to creativity and imagination, innovation and revolution.
Nick backs Germaine, to a point, especially in that nasty little statistic (massive, really!) - forty-seven percent (47%) of Queenslanders "cannot read a complex newspaper article or the instructions on a medicine bottle", referring to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collection under the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey. This gives a good layman description for the study from the ABS themselves.
But I wanted to take a look at this report with my own eyeballs. I always like to trace the source. Where is the 47%? I had difficulty finding it.
You could take it from the Media Release, which states that:
"Just over half (54%) of Australians aged 15 to 74 years were assessed as having the prose literacy skills needed to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work. Results were similar for document literacy with 53% and numeracy with 47% achieving this level."
If you do some simple maths (for example, 100 - 53 = 47), and then use the logical negation of the clause (that is, NOT), you could get:
Nearly half (46%) of Australians aged 15 to 74 years were assessed as NOT having the prose literacy skills needed to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work. Results were similar for document literacy with 47% (that magical 47%?) and numeracy with 53% NOT achieving this level.
Is this a fair interpretation of the summary information and media release?
Maybe, but the statistics really come from the summary and in the definitions. In the areas of prose literacy and document literacy, Australia had 46% and 47% respectively combining level 1 and level 2 competencies.
The report studied four key areas, although there are some interesting additional health skills being studied in the recent data capture. Two, prose and document literacy, are of interest in this discussion:
- Prose literacy: the ability to understand and use information from various kinds of narrative texts, including texts from newspapers, magazines and brochures.
- Document literacy: the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in various formats including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables and charts.
For prose literacy:
- Level 1 - Most of the tasks in this level require the respondent to read relatively short text to locate a single piece of information which is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question or directive. If plausible but incorrect information is present in the text, it tends not to be located near the correct information;
- Level 2 - Some tasks in this level require respondents to locate a single piece of information in the text; however, several distractors or plausible but incorrect pieces of information may be present, or low-level inferences may be required. Other tasks require the respondent to integrate two or more pieces of information or to compare and contrast easily identifiable information based on a criterion provided in the question or directive;
- Level 3 - Tasks in this level tend to require respondents to make literal or synonymous matches between the text and information given in the task, or to make matches that require low-level inferences. Other tasks ask respondents to integrate information from dense or lengthy text that contains no organisational aids such as headings. Respondents may also be asked to generate a response based on information that can be easily identified in the text. Distracting information is present, but is not located near the correct information.
Just for reference, 38.1% of Queenslanders have a prose literacy level of 3 (Australia overall is 37.4%), which according to that Canadian study is the minimum level to deal with the live and work in the developed economies.
For document literacy:
- Level 1 - Tasks in this level tend to require the respondent either to locate a piece of information based on a literal match or to enter information from personal knowledge onto a document. Little, if any, distracting information is present;
- Level 2 - Tasks in this level are more varied than those in Level 1. Some require the respondents to match a single piece of information; however, several distractors may be present, or the match may require low-level inferences. Tasks in this level may also ask the respondent to cycle through information in a document or to integrate information from various parts of a document.
- Level 3 - Some tasks in this level require the respondent to integrate multiple pieces of information from one or more documents. Others ask respondents to cycle through rather complex tables or graphs which contain information that is irrelevant or inappropriate to the task.
Also for reference, 36.6% of Queenslanders have a prose literacy level of 3 (Australia overall is 35.5%).
This could also be where that 47% number came from, but the key issue here is not where the numbers fell - we have those gathered by the study, and if we accept that the numbers are measuring what they are supposed to be measuring then the gold is actually in the Canadian (and OECD) report.
For literacy level 3 is the "minimum for persons to understand and use information contained in the increasingly difficult texts and tasks that characterise the emerging knowledge society and information economy". It is intended to correspond to upper secondary education, and usually acquired through 9 years of regulated teaching to advance from level 2 to level 3, from my non-professional reading of this.
So now we can acknowledge that Dr Greer got the statistics correctly interpreted, and Nick even made a comment on the smugness of non-Queenslanders in the assessment (go check your own numbers for those in other states), but the relevance is specifically in reference to the OECD consideration that if you want to build a knowledge economy and a culture of innovative, you need to have level 3 or above in literacy.
To boil it back down to the main point, and as a writer, somewhat depressingly, nearly half of all Australians do not have this competency. Where the blame resides is for someone else to consider. But I would agree with Germaine and Nick that the statistics are concerning. We shall have to wait for the next set of statistics to start looking at potential trends.
For me, I would consider this:
The sunburned country; the lucky country; the literate country - pick two!
Other highlights at the festival included talking to Chris Cleave and Martin (Ed) Chatterton, as well as the launch of the Australian Writer's Marketplace.
The session with Chris had six of us sitting around a table and asking questions from technical aspects of writing, voice, structure, and use of common cultural items. I found a lot of the discussion in the room guided me to a little revelation that stories are stories, no matter what genre they happen to be told in. My characters in my science fiction novels would be just as much characters in a western or a romance, or a hard boiled detective novel. This story can be told in many ways and it might be that the original story concept is not actually the story that needs to be told.
The discussion also touched on marketing in different countries and timeliness of releases, to look forward into the future to identify the cultural pressure points that will exist and target a novel or a release of fiction toward coinciding with the questions the public will have at the time the event occurs. Chris's example is from his forthcoming novel dealing with veterans and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2013.
The session with Martin had less than 20 of us in a room with technical difficulties of Keynote to PowerPoint, but finally, a wall of books extracted from a travel bag, "Oh, yeah? I've published nearly 40 books!" The guy must know what he is talking about, and his jolly manner, despite writing a recent crime novel (A Dark Place to Die) was genuinely infectious. I suspect this is because Martin is not grown up himself yet, which is why I liked him so much.
In Martin's session we wrote a first paragraph to learn how to grab the reader from those first words, and as mentioned, we had some technical difficulties, the material in the slides included copies of his submissions in three case studies of his books. I found this information incredibly useful to get an eyeball on a real submission, and some trails of what paths could happen.
All in all, I really enjoyed the Brisbane Writers Festival - 50 years old - but I did feel it was very distributed across the area and it was difficult to tell who were general public and who were interested in the festival. There are bound to be pros and cons for this approach, but it would have been nice to engage more - perhaps that is just me being anti-social. I will definitely go back next year.
