***more and more young people will "lose literacy" as encounters with any sort of "long form" text disappear in a onslaught of video and aural bombardment and interaction***
Yesterday morning, I'd have readily agreed with that, SensualPoet. Last night changed my mind completely.
My sixteen-year-old granddaughter's over at my place in France for a visit. I reckoned she was pretty much representative of her age group, judging by her FaceBook posts and text messages in some kind of odd jargon I can hardly understand. All phonetic, obscure abbreviations, no capitals and no punctuation.
Last night, she suddenly became dead silent on a lounger on my terrace. I noticed she was reading a YA paperback. After two or three hours, she toddled off to bed and I took a look at the book. It runs to well over 500 pages and a bookmark showed she was more than half way through. She'd been utterly absorbed while three or four handy computers lay idle. I also noticed that she was taking encouraging interest in my reader.
Maybe I misunderstood all along and was too qiuck to judge. Cheers. Neil
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