My Theory of Literacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

My Theory of Literacy - Essay Example ready reck 1r skills are needed in education as well as in the job. What good an private that can just read and write do in the contemporary organization in which manual of arms work has been replaced with mechanical work? In the past, persons with an ability to write and read were considered literate because these two skills sufficed to be employed in any organization, but contemporary organizations are way more demanding. The contemporary rendering of literacy is incomplete unless the significance of computer skills is ack in a flashledged and set as one of the criteria for judgment of an individual literacy. Charles Bazerman define literacy in these words, Literacy does not require or inexorably lead to any particular development, but it is a powerful tool available for organizing, extending, providing resources for, and transforming all of our hearty endeavors (Bazerman cited in Goggin). Writing is conventionally associated with creativi ty. Every foot of opus has to be original or it would be considered as plagiarized. Thus, writing is essentially a construct and the writer is an inventor, but Bazerman does not consider such a person necessarily literate. His definition of literacy requires a literate person to be able to organize, promote, support and transform his/her social efforts using his/her literary skills. in all of these functions are achieved with a computer these days. Computer helps organize the data. Programs like Microsoft Excel help not exactly organize the data, but also perform different kinds of functions upon it. Programs like Corel Draw transform imagination into reality. An in-depth analysis of the computer skills suggests that use of computer does a lot to improve a persons social and critical analysis skills. Many contemporary perspectives on literacy view scripted text as one component of complex acts and practices of written communication that occur in social contexts (Goggin). Moder n age is characterized by social media. Today, writing has evolved so much that it encapsulates a lot of linguistic styles that were unknown to the writers of the past. Old publications is characterized by formality. Modern literature is informal to the maximum limits. In the past, there used to be abbreviations for large words. Nowadays, there are abbreviations for phrases. For example, also known as is written as aka, laughing out tawdry is written as lol. These are only two of the hundreds of abbreviations that chatting on social media websites has given birth to. Today, an individual who is able to write but does not understand or use these abbreviations in the scripts is as untaught as anyone in the past who could not write. These abbreviations and such other modifications of literature are a leave of the time-based modification in the assumptions and values of people. Robert Scholes had realized the importance of modern and emerging linguistic patterns in the writing back in 1985. He expressed his realization in these words What students need from us . . . now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, two individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in nearly appropriate manner. (Scholes cited in Schwartz). Of the two texts, Schwartz has presented a more rational analysis of the concept of literacy by punctuate upon the need to