In Kaestle’s article, “The History of Literacy,” he lists some of the “technological features” (16) of writing. These are objective benefits of written texts including “replication, transportation, and preservation of messages” (16) which allows for things like recipes, laws, and multiplication tables to exist. What writing allows for is the sharing of the exact same message, so that in theory, everyone with the ability to read would be able to understand it in the same way. However, this doesn’t account for the different categories of writing that exist within a single language.
For example, legal documents and academic articles are two writing styles meant to objectively state their argument with sufficient evidence. It is rare, though, that the average American could read one of these and actually be able to decipher the meaning the way that a lawyer or academic could. As a third-year college student, I often struggle to retrieve rudimentary concepts from dense sentences packed with needless jargon.
Its funny to think that writing intended to share knowledge or information is often exclusive to those that can read it (often those with specialized education), and are inaccessible to the general public in terms of comprehension. Making use of literacy today seems to require a lot more work because writing in any context often isn’t as straight forward as it should be–especially in legal and political contexts.
