How to join the elite - learn to read
Here’s a little test. Click here and read the article in the box.
Now, can you tell me the answer to this question: “What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?”
That seems simple enough, right? The article lays it out: to learn about marketing to the Hispanic community, and to meet others interested in business and marketing opportunities related to Hispanic people.
Is that right? The correct answer is Any statement such as the following: to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community
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When the task of providing such a summary was put to a large set of Americans in 1992, only 16% of adult respondents could correctly answer the question. Think about that for a moment: only 16% of people in the most powerful Western nation can understand an article in a business magazine well enough that they can explain the thrust of the article. I put the article through an online readability calculator (like the one in Word, but I don’t use Word) which told me it had a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease of 49.9%, and that it should be readable by a tenth grader (equivalent to age 15-16).
There’s this strange idea that floats around of there being an intellectual elite that works hard to keep the ordinary person down. Well, 16% seems a reasonable definition of “elite”. All you have to do to join the intellectual elite is to be able to read an article from Hispanic Business Magazine and not end up drooling in a stupor when asked to recite a fairly central element - namely, the intended purpose of the main topic of the article. I find the whole thing utterly bemusing. I mean, it can’t be real? I mean, how could you cope with life without the ability to comprehend straight-forward pieces of non-fiction journalism. If only 16% of the population can read and comprehend this article, then what does it mean to say that 29% of Americans (over 25) have a Bachelor’s degree? The best thing we can say is that you can get a Bachelor’s degree and still have a fifty-fifty chance of not being able to read and comprehend an article in Hispanic Business Magazine. That’s not good. Not good at all.
Of course, this is not a problem exclusive to the United States. I’m sure similar figures can and have been produced about many other countries including the UK. The United States just has all the materials online which enables the problem to be illustrated very vividly.
As a sidenote, I’ve always been quite sceptical about Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease though. It’s a reasonable way of measuring the surface level of complexity, but it doesn’t actually help you figure out how readable a piece of text is. As a point of comparison, I took an essay I wrote in preparation for the finals of my Philosophy MA, a rather dense essay on ontology, and ran it through Flesch-Kincaid, only to find it had a Reading Ease of 44.9% and that it was best suited for students in the thirteenth grade. Awesomeo! Who’s the daddy? If my crime is that I take quite a complex bit of metaphysics and make it readable enough for first-year university students, I plead guilty. I learned my craft from reading Russell, Armstrong and Kripke, posting a ton on Twitter and staying as far away as possible from Scientologists, Derrideans and other jargon-filled bullshitters. Okay, let’s be serious. The fact that most people can’t understand the Hispanic Business Magazine piece rather buggers it up. But I know that if I were to ask someone untrained in philosophy to read my essay, they would have a lot more trouble picking through it than through a piece about a Hispanic marketing conference in Chicago. That’s because although the two are broadly equivalent in sentence length and syllables-per-word count, the two subjects differ in how abstract they are. Figuring out how to sell cola to Hispanics is a pretty concrete thing in the world; engaging in a logical meditation about the fundamental nature of properties is not. Business is a rather natural pursuit for good Darwinian reasons. I don’t know about you, but “I spend my days trying to understand the word ‘the’ and what it means to say that a red felt-tip pen and a red phonebox are both red” doesn’t quite cut it in the natural selection game in the same way that being a millionaire stockbroker living in a penthouse suite does having made it big betting on Hispanic marketing companies.
