A Matter Of Quality
By Teresa Jusino
No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college.
- Nadia, 15, author of “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad”
(and yes, that’s how she spelled ‘dying’)
A recent New York Times article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, discusses the ongoing debate as to whether or not reading things online is actually reading.
I’ve always been a staunch defender of the web as a source of both entertainment and information, and challenged those who are quick to pooh-pooh the internet as intrinsically inferior. As I began the Times piece, I was preparing a rebuttal against the internet naysayers. Then I came to this:
Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.
“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”
Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.
Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.”
Suddenly, I was pooh-poohing the internet along with its critics. She wants to be an English major, be a writer, and get published?! She can’t even spell dying, or be bothered to use spell-check! She can’t even be bothered to read other books to see what her competition is up to! Never mind that as an English major in college she’ll be required to do much more reading than she ever had to do in high school, and for which she will be unprepared without practice. Whoever’s not telling her that she “should read more books to get into college” is doing her a grave disservice.
This article got me thinking about why the naysayers are naysaying. It also got me thinking about why I, an avid internet user, love to read and don’t see the internet as a threat to literature.
I realized that mine is the last generation to know what life was like before the internet. The internet was only a baby when I began junior high in the early nineties, and I didn’t have my first e-mail address until I was about 15 or 16 when I heard about this new thing called Hotmail, where you didn’t have to have AOL in your home to have e-mail! You could have an e-mail address for FREE that you could check from anywhere! Hotmail was dope!
But what was I doing all those years before the internet? I was reading – anything and everything I could get my hands on. When I was little, trips to the library (you know, that place where you could borrow books before you could sit in Barnes & Noble and read them for free, or buy them used on Amazon.com?) were a treat, and I always came home with a stack of books almost as tall as I. Reading was highly encouraged in my house, and we never had to be forced to read. And while television tried to compete for our attention, and my older brother and sister bemoaned the fact that I was growing up at a time when VCRs could record TV shows so I could watch them whenever I wanted, we didn’t have as much to distract us from our reading as children do today. The internet was a luxury, not a necessity, and it was rare to have a friend who had a home computer, let alone the internet. Times being what they are, I suppose kids today can’t be blamed for not being as interested in the printed word. Today’s high schoolers have never known life without the internet, and have myriad media sources pulling them in all directions. How can they be expected to sit still and read when they are under constant assault by things flashing, flipping, and scrolling on screens?
Yet, even back before the internet there were debates about what constituted reading. I remember teachers making the distinction between reading books (the preferred option) and magazines (fluff) or comics (not reading at all). Medium, it seems, has always been an issue in the ongoing debate about literacy.
The thing is, at least to me, what you read is more important than how you read. Whether you’re reading on a screen or on the printed page doesn’t matter. If it did, books on tape (gulp! CD! I’m only 29 and I’m technologically SO OLD!) wouldn’t be considered reading either.
It’s a matter of quality, and this is where I think the internet naysayers have it right. Just as there’s a difference between reading The Brothers Karamazov and The Devil Wears Prada, there’s a difference between reading The New York Times online and reading fan fiction. There’s a difference between reading your favorite author’s serialized short stories on their website, and reading Joe Schmoe’s ranting and raving about his personal life on his blog.
It’s a matter of quality, and this is the internet’s biggest flaw…it’s all chiefs and no Indians. It’s all writers and no editors. It’s made up of people who have a great deal to say, but don’t put much thought into how they want to say it. There’s no one out there calling the shots, sending these people back home until they learn how to spell, or at least learn to proofread and utilize their spell-check function. There’s no one critiquing them on their inability to write a coherent sentence. For every blog or website that has an editorial staff ensuring some kind of quality (thank you Lisa and Julianna!), there are a million others set up by people who may or may not care about silly things like that. I found it amusing that 15-year-old Nadia thinks that because she writes stories online without reading anything else that that alone puts her on the road toward becoming a writer and getting published. If she somehow manages to coast through college and catch a literary agent on a very good day, there’s still the matter of dealing with the editor of a publishing house who will go through every word she writes with a fine-toothed comb, providing a rude awakening.
And this is the greatest strength of The Book. The Book has passed before many pairs of eyes before being published and in your hands. The Book has been written, rewritten, and edited so the reader receives it in the best possible version. When you read a book, you are guaranteed a certain level of quality. Say what you might about “beach reads” like The Devil Wears Prada. I promise you it’s written a million times better than Jane Doe’s Whine-A-Long Blog.
The internet isn’t going away, nor should it, and I believe that eventually what we consider “literature” will come to include the internet in a big way. Battles have always raged between high-brow and low-brow forms of art, and that won’t go away either. However, for the sake of children like Nadia, the debate right now shouldn’t be about whether reading on the internet is “actually reading,” but about how to ensure a certain level of quality. The only way this can happen is if we include the internet in our discussions about literature. By including it, we can develop standards for it. We can encourage more of our good authors to include more of their work online. We can begin to differentiate between the “beach reads” and the “serious literature” to be found there. Most importantly, we can go online with our children and help them make those distinctions in the current internet climate. Fiction from The New Yorker is just as readily available as the latest webcomic, and while I don’t think teenagers will necessarily be flocking to read New Yorker fiction, I do believe they can be encouraged to surf toward challenging content. I believe teenagers want to be challenged just as much as they want to challenge, but we have to believe in them. Criticizing their medium of choice doesn’t help. What I think will is helping them navigate it and teaching them not to accept mediocrity, no matter what its form.
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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so. As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. Also, she has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which is now being rivaled by her burgeoning crush on Robert Downey Jr. in his Iron Man suit.
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Say what you might about “beach reads” like The Devil Wears Prada. I promise you it’s written a million times better than Jane Doe’s Whine-A-Long Blog.
I dunno. I agree that you’re granted quality as far as editing like you said, but actual content quality? But then again, I really didn’t care for The Devil Wears Prada much, so that is seriously influencing my opinion.
Anyway, your article was much more interesting than the New York Times one. I had a couple of eye twitch moments reading that NYT article (I get frustrated way too easily). :p
As a consumer of fanfiction (and an occassional attempted giver of feedback beyond the level of “OMG, U Rock, mor pleeze!”) and blogs, I have to agree with you on every vital point.
There is some really great stuff online, but there is a LOT MORE crap, and a lot of people who simply don’t care that it’s crap or that spelling/spellchecking and structure are being totally cast aside. I don’t like to be ‘grammar nazi’ or ’spelling nazi,’ but someone needs to tell people like Nadia that there are standards in the world… because someday there might not be when kids like this grow up.
I’d point back to the earlier article about the “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need Them” book, which I read and thought about. I don’t know if similar things happen in non-English speaking countries (because my non-English is not strong enough to get serious on editing), but at the very least, English is getting murdered on-line.
Every year I have a number of kids who approach me and announce that they hate reading and go into great detail about the horrible physical pains they’d rather go through than opening up a book. I’ve stopped getting all teeth-grindy about this kind of thing because some kids are just never going to read for fun. For those kids, I make it clear that they do have to read for function. Whether they like it or not, they have to be able to comprehend and make inferences, etc.
But, kids like Nadia make my head explode. She wants to go to college without having read books? She wants to be a writer without having read books? I hope she gets to college and her first English professor rips her a new one. It sounds like no one has ever given her constructive criticism or a bad English grade That makes me think she’s been homeschooled most of her life. If she’s had actual English teachers, those teachers should grow a pair and start enforcing the basics.
We should be able to count on English teachers to tell young writers how much they suck. It’s good practice for the mountain of rejection letters most writers will get over the course of their careers.
I’m so flustered about this that I hit “submit comment” before I meant to. GRRR!
@Trish: I’ve noticed that online writing habits are seeping into real life writing tasks. I’m getting more and more student essays that are written like blog posts. A lot of the kids aren’t using text-speak in their essays, but conventions like indenting paragraphs are disappearing. Also, my students submit their essays electronically as Word docs – a lot of them try skipping footnotes and works cited pages in favor of hyperlinking all over the place. So, “ESSAYS ARE NOT BLOG POSTS” went into my revised course syllabus.
@Rhea: I’m in agreement with you on content quality, because I think that’s largely subjective. A book may be far superior in literary conventions, structure, historical significance, etc., but can still suck hairy a$$ on a consumption level.
Also, what we consider “quality” in literature is often tied into age. For instance, Pride and Prejudice (which is one of my favorite books, BTW) is on high school reading lists across the country. But, when you get right down to it, it’s chick lit. Old, historical chick lit that teaches us about the manners and habits of British society at the time, but nonetheless, chick lit.
Quality is highly subjective– and anyone who has studied or just read ‘the classics’ can verify that. I suppose what makes some of what is essentially fancy chick lit or adventure stories (I’m looking at you, ‘Treasure Island’!) is because they were first in some way or something similar to that (and here I reveal how I’m a fictional whiz, but sometimes an historical dunce, and a junkie for asides!).
I’d pick King’s Dark Tower saga over Tolkien’s Ring saga any day… though I know King openly acknowledges Tolkien as an inspiration. The Ring saga was first, so it gets all the love even though I think it has a huge case of Too Much Information (Okay, everyone who needed to know precise historical battle information, raise their hand, now… thank you).
I’m not putting down literature that gets its start on-line. I’m a Sigler convert, and a bitch of Mur, and the list goes on and way on… and I have a lot of fanfic authors I enjoy as well as bloggers. I enjoy a lot of them in spite of typoes or obviously bad sentences or confusing/wrong bits, but I hate to see ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ go completely out the window. More than that I hate to see the idea of reading things that aren’t on a screen go out the window. Now I sound like Giles… but dammit, sometimes old British men can be right!
Kudos to you, Alpha-Girl for drawing lines for your students. It’s okay to know stuff and use it. Really, the netspeak is just a sort of laziness, and kids need to put off giving in to that for as long as they can manage (I remember the feeling of temptation, LOL). I tutored college math and science for awhile, and oy… high school NEEDS some good teachers.
*Realizes she just rambled pointlessly, but it’s been a rough day* Next time you guys catch up with me in RL I will buy the beers, which is safe because… well obvious reasons! HA!
@ Trish: Old British men (especially when they’re Giles) are also hot.
I kind of feel like this is something that will work itself out, though. Like I said, this is the first generation of kids that have totally grown up with the internet…as with any big change, it’s scary, and people tend to go to extremes. But once it becomes more the norm, the “debate” will settle down, and we’ll be back to the old boring debates about quality of content as opposed to quality of medium. At least I hope so.
Incidentally, when I sent the link of my article to a friend of mine, he followed the link to the New York Times article, then followed one of their links to an Atlantic Monthly article…
He has yet to read THIS article.
Oh, internet. Distracting People With Shiny Things Since 1992.
“I go online sometimes, but … everyone’s spelling is really bad, and it’s … depressing.”
–Tara Maclay, ‘I Was Made to Love You’
I can see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, I’m also of the same generation as Teresa and also an avid reader. (It’s a rare thing for me to be reading one book at a time, especially now that I’ve joined a friend’s book club.) I’ve been called everything from “the best proofreader in the dorm” to “grammar nazi” for my mad English skillz. (Ahem, skills.) As a rabid fangirl, I have seen a lot of fanfiction and blog/forum posts that demonstrate exactly the sort of decline the article describes, and I rarely bother to comment or correct them — partly for fear of retaliatory flaming, and partly because if it’s bad enough I have an almost physical revulsion and have to get away from the offending text as quickly as possible. And don’t even get me started on the teens and tweens who actually have face-to-face conversations in IM-speak.
On the other hand, I have seen some outstanding stories online that are meticulously beta-read and edited for quality. I’m eagerly awaiting J.C. Hutchins’ Seventh Son books, even though I’ve already heard the whole story through his podiobook releases. I’m loving Shadow Unit, an online series collaboration from the likes of Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, and several other published authors. There are a number of blogs and forums where the posters are well-educated and demonstrate fantastic grammar and spelling. I’m a big fan of the internet as an information source and a social medium. (Full disclosure: I work in research library with a small staff.) If the internet is getting young people to read, it’s at least a step in the right direction.
And a traditional paper-and-ink format doesn’t necessarily guarantee quality. I have a cousin (who is almost a generation older) who self-published a physical book about a decade ago. It was riddled with so many errors that our great-aunt (a retired English teacher) came very close to getting out her red pen. After hearing that, I didn’t have the courage to read it at all.
I find it fascinating that Nadia (in the NYT article) was willing to read some fairly heavy non-fiction books, but prefers her fiction to be of the online fan variety. It makes me wonder whether her mother might have more success getting her to read media tie-in novels as a sort of gateway. In my experience, tie-ins are about as hit-or-miss as fanfic for narrative quality, but at least they have to pass through the editorial process.
It is my hope that those of us who have acquired a certain level of proficiency can lead by example in the online world. As more and more communication moves to the internet, the new generation will need to learn that the quality of their writing influences how seriously they will be taken.
When you’re really young, you think the world was invented for you and nothing interesting happened before you were born. But you get over it. That’s part of the fun of growing up – finding music and literature and other influences to excite and inspire.
One of my young(er) friends told me that he devoured any kind of elf fantasy he could get his hands on until he learned that they all had their roots in LOTR. Once he read that, the fantasy world was never the same for him, and he’s since become interested in other types of writing and is currently writing a novel.
My late husband never read more than the occasional comic book growing up and whatever school required him to read, but by the time he died he was an avid reader who frequently requested books as gifts.
We’ve all had those “where has this been all my life” moments and so will succeeding generations. As you pointed out, there are some kids who will never “get” literature. Maybe they learn in a tactile manner or they’re audio-attuned. But not to worry: as long as books exist, they will be discovered and loved.
You’ve got points about the ‘ah hah’ moments. The person one is at 13 is not the person they are at 15, even, let alone 18 or 25 or, heaven forbid, 30…
However, I really don’t want to see netspeak spelling become ’standard.’ R and 2 and 4 and a lot of the common things are just… well, lazy, and kind of make me cringe I hate to think this is what people are reading from our English Speakers.
I just gave a full-read (as opposed to skim) of the NY Times article, and yeah, that Nadia could find empathy for the holocaust victims and read their stories is encouraging. Watch me stereotype now… Teens (and especially anime fangirl teens [from experience? Maybe.]) relate to torture and angst (have you read the number of rape-torture fantasies out there, oy vey, that’s another series of articles entirely). However, to go back on the complimentary subject… it is good that she doesn’t feel she doesn’t have to relate solely through the internet.
On another subject, I agree with the boy who disagreed with the earlier statement that the shared culture comes more strongly from books. I feel like the sharing is at least as strong and more immediate online. However, what we have saved (on hard disk, on paper, or on some sort of recording) is what we have of those who came before us, and it’s good to remember them.
I’ll get off my old (sexy) British Guy rocker and go back in, and let the kids play on the yard… and probably play, too, soon as I’ve taken off my tweeds for the afternoon… but you won’t catch me using the for=4 or their=there=they’re or ur=you are, I’ll stick to being a grammar nazi on the inside.
As to the link-maze, if the internet didn’t distract me with shiny links then I’d have to resort to research and delayed gratification like in the old days… which seriously limited my intake. Damn you, meatspace!
Working in a bookstore, I see a lot of people dismiss what I consider to be legitimate genres of ‘literature’. Comic books, graphics novels, and manga being a large amount of things cast out by parents and grandparents after they’ve sent their children to ‘go find a book’. Then they themselves walk up with Nora Roberts or her non-nom de plume, J.D. Robb.
Of course, I am biased as I read comic books, graphic novels, and manga. Not Nora Roberts.
@April Dawn Lots of people completely ‘judge a book by its cover’ by writing off stuff they haven’t tried, like the comics. A lot of those are just as good as the latest Grisham or whomever. Of course, taste is very subjective.
Really, if you break most things down objectively, story-wise your ‘classics’ aren’t that spiffy. Sure, you can go and dig out the analogies– which are great when they’re actually there– and symbolism… but unless you’re studying it academically that’s not what sticks with the reader overtly. Well, not me, anyway. Who’s to say X comic or popular novel wasn’t written with a higher message in mind, anyway?
I’m 100% behind people finding a story they love and reading/watching/getting involved in it, whatever it is. If I have kids I won’t stop them from reading anything (that’s more or less age-appropriate… no porn until you’re 18, LOL! No Danielle Steele until we have a long talk! Yadda yadda.). I will make sure they know proper grammar, math skills, history, and generally try to pick up the slack (if any *crosses fingers hopefully*) that their teachers leave.
The one thing I want to clarify is that, though I was hard on her in my post, I don’t blame Nadia at all.
1) She clearly enjoys difficult non-fiction. It’s certainly not a requirement for everyone to love classic fiction.
2) @Robyn – I’ve definitely thought of your point re: teenagers thinking the world was created for them, and yes, it’s something that passes. Teenagers don’t have a historical context for anything. Lord knows I didn’t. But as they get older they see how what they like fits into the continuum of what came before…
My point in writing this was not to tear kids like Nadia down. It was to point out that:
1) Medium doesn’t matter, and
2) We need to be involved in what our children our doing, not just dismiss it as something that’s not up to our standards. Because our standards will eventually give way to new standards, and if we don’t take an active role in how our children learn now, we’ll find that they’ve evolved without us, and we would’ve had no say in the standards of the future.
Teresa,
very good piece. I riffed on it today and at the same time gave you and your site my first ever C.O.F. Award.
The only thing I’d stress beyond what you said is that a sub-text tan through the entire NYT article was ‘make things easier for the kids and maybe more of them will get it’; some folks these days just don’t understand that most things that are worthwile are things that need to be worked at.