The Purposeful Prose Advice Column: The Victors Are Always the Readers

Dear Purposeful Prose,

Given America’s growing literacy crisis, will books as we know them continue to stay relevant? Will authors still be able to publish books and expect to be read? What kind of society are we creating?

If you haven’t already read “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler, it was published in Azimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1983. In a mysterious pandemic, researcher and scholar Valerie Rye is navigating life suddenly unable to read or comprehend the written word. Most of the pandemic’s survivors have lost an ability to either express or communicate language. Some are unable to speak, some are unable to comprehend the words spoken to them, others like Valerie are unable to read. The pandemic hasn’t erased the history of the people it affected, so they remember having the abilities they lost in the past. 

While I know there was a time in my life when I was learning to read, comprehend, and express myself through language, I cannot imagine one of those abilities as lost. For me, it would be devastating. In “Speech Sounds,” that devastation was more than evident. People became resentful of those with those lost abilities to the point of horrific violence. It was common practice to hide one’s ability to speak for safety. 

It is the work of science fiction to take a reasonable truth, a warning, and place it in an estranged setting that reflects our own. Butler is known for, above all, putting truth first and foremost in her writing. 

As someone who works with students who are learning foundational reading skills, I have witnessed the resentment of students who see others progressing differently. Such resentments, if left unchecked, become hedge mazes. This is to say, I haven’t seen every truth of “Speech Sounds” lived to its capacity, but I can say with certainty that I fear it. 

To be clear, I have no qualms with literary/academic pursuits that are aided by some technology, audiobooks, or assistive technology for people with disabilities. Regardless of how technology develops, demand for print books is too high to be abandoned entirely. 

Also, no matter how often AI is touted as a storyteller, as a means to summarize the classics, or as a catalyst for cognitive offloading, the truth is that the readers and rhetors who have climbed the mountain will always win. 

In a previous article, I compared writing to mountain climbing. It is possible to go up a mountain in a helicopter and get dropped off at the top, but the person who climbed the mountain will get to experience the feeling of having overcome every obstacle. Their body and health will probably thank them as well. They’ll get to share the experience of climbing that mountain with friends. 

“I traveled to the top of a mountain in a helicopter,” can be the start of an interesting story about riding in a helicopter, but when comparing two accounts about traveling to the top of a mountain, I know which one I’d want to hear. 

If you’ve put the time and effort into writing your own piece, you get the experience of writing in the way you intend to be presented and in the turn of phrase that is distinctively you. If you’ve done that, uninhibited, you have won.

If you have put the time and effort into reading books the way the author wrote them (either through physically reading the words or through an audiobook), again, you’ve won. 

If their work, consumed using the author’s language [with exceptions made to translations and abridged copies] has had an impact on you, and you have a point of view on the work you can actively engage with, you’ve won. 

Your victory isn’t hollow. 

Valeria Luiselli’s book, Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, published in 2017, was structured around the forty questions that Luiselli had to ask as a volunteer interpreter to children. Answers to these questions determined the children’s legal status in the US.

The following is a quote from the end of an interview with Luiselli on her book:

“Through storytelling, and essays can very much be storytelling, people that didn’t have a previous connection to a situation, that were foreign to a situation, can get closer to it. It is a way of translation. Translation is carrying something from one context to the other, so you write a story like you’re translating it. If this book is a translation, it is not foreignizing language, but domesticizing it. It brings something that is apparently foreign so close to the reader that they can realize it is not a foreign problem, not a distant thing; it’s something that’s right here, in front of us and part of us. Another way to say it is that storytelling can create empathy, beyond sentimentalism. Empathy in a deeper way, especially in a time like now, when we have a huge rate of intolerance. Much needed empathy for all of us.”

Something that you, as a writer and a reader, might have noticed as a component of the ongoing literacy crisis, as we understand it, is not caring. Some people, children even, show that they are not motivated to learn how to read. Some, even, have become disinterested in stories. A lack of stories alone are not to blame for a lack of empathy, but it doesn’t help.

We cannot experience all there is to experience in the world. We will all face our own hardships, and we will never fully understand what it is to experience the hardships we do not face, but we have stories. As Luiselli stated, stories bring what we will not experience in our lifetime and what we will experience eventually to us so that we can make as sincere a connection to it as possible without being there. 

This is not to say that if you read something, you’ll immediately understand what it is to walk in someone else’s shoes or that you’ll be correct in making highly generalized assumptions about people because you’ve consumed one story. 

Correctly consumed, you will be in dialogue. You will understand more than you did before reading what you’ve read. Perhaps you’ll draw parallels to your own life and experience. What feels distant will, instead, be familiar instead of overwhelming. 

You have won because you were open to taking in stories, and your capacity for empathy for those outside of yourself has grown. 

Additionally, stories facilitate creative problem solving. Again, everyone faces hardship in one form or another, but differences lie in how we associate with that hardship. It’s possible that the answer to your problem is as simple as communicating or following a clear set of steps. 

Since we have stories, and stories contain problems and solutions, all of the frameworks from the stories that we’ve read alongside reason are at our disposal. Not every story will have the solution to our problems, and those stories will sometimes come with poorly reasoned solutions. That said, it’s up to the readers to determine that those solutions are poorly reasoned and to do the right thing in their own lives. If you have carried storytelling with you, you carry that creativity with you as well. 

You have won because your interpretation of stories and your understanding of how the world operates can give you creative solutions to problems that appear difficult or impossible. 

Even better, take storytelling with you, and your memory will improve. Stories have been used to teach concepts for centuries, and stories naturally make things easier to remember. The names of the planets, strategies for long division, and punctuation rules are often taught through stories. You will likely remember a thing more clearly if there is a story associated with it. In reality, overall, consuming stories and the brain activity that results from said consumption will improve your memory in the long-term. The same story told in different ways, also, will affect the brain differently. 

You have won because you are nurturing your memory. 

Returning to your question, again, books are in too high demand to become obsolete anytime soon. Despite the existing literacy crisis, which I do not deny, there will always be people who desire to learn, to read, and to express themselves as authors. There will always be people who want to win as you have won. Falling into the world of “Speech Sounds” is a terrifying thought. 

I do not use this framing to say that people who have difficulty expressing themselves through words or do not read as often are lesser. This is not to disparage or to devalue. More specifically, this framing is to say that devaluing books, authors, and the pursuit of literacy in any form through large language models or other means does not and will never mark progress. 

If you have a writing or editing-focused question, I would be more than happy to dedicate a post to you. Contact us with any questions you might have or to schedule a free consultation with yours truly!

All submissions will remain anonymous unless you explicitly request for me to include your name.