Hmoud Alotaibi
ENG 677
Reading Response# 1
January 25, 2010
In Literacy, the authors provide very solid resources about literacy. Literacy is questioned as a concept, by posing questions like: “What is literacy?” and “Why study literacy.” Three articles were presented highlighting the dangers of illiteracy in society. This resource book works as a key element to completely educate people of the consequences in the presence and the absence of literacy. In Ways with Words, Shirley Brice raises an important issue when she suggests an alternative view about our understanding of literacy. She looks to literacy not on an individual basis but on a societal one. It has been thought that literacy is an individual issue; for instance, we call that person an illiterate if he or she does not know how to read and write. However, Brice widens the scope of literacy to include all societal views and conceptions. The most interesting aspect of the reading for me was that John Duffy uses this concept to rename or redefine “rhetoric”.
It is very interesting to link rhetoric to literacy. Literacy has been commonly known to be an individual consideration. The most striking issue raised by Duffy is his new concept of rhetoric. He states, “By rhetoric I mean the ways that institutions and individuals use symbols to structure their thought and shape their conceptions of the world”(Duffy 38). This is a very elegant point because of the effective consequence on the whole society. For example, inside the school environment, literacy can mean more than the ability of a child to read and write. It is actually the implementation that the school system uses to affect the whole community. Rhetoric, in Duffy’s understanding, is not simply a way of persuasion but it is actually the implementation of these systems used by the school. The example of Hmong students in Lao schools is quite obvious. Hmong students were not taught only to read and write but also to give their complete loyalty towards the Lao government and nation.
During the “Great Depression” the Federal Writers’ Project was initiated to help writers educate the society as a whole. This new understanding may lead us to develop the notion of literacy. As stated above, it does not simply indicate the ability to read and write, but it works as a strong rhetoric component in shaping people’s conceptions and views about the world and more importantly about themselves.
