Don't blame spellcheckers

There is an Eeyore-ish undercurrent to the reports that computers are bad for our literacy
    • The Guardian,
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Apparently, literacy levels are sinking so miserably that employers are having to teach new staff to read; you'd think this was something that could be weeded out at interview stage, somewhere between "What GCSEs did you get? Oh, none, you say?" and "What five adjectives would your friends use about you?"

Spellcheckers have turned everybody into a brilliant speller, so long as you're happy for "s" and "z" to be mainly interchangeable, and you rarely use the word theatre. It's terribly unfair - in my early days of applying for jobs, you could lose a whole raft by claiming a keen attention to dotail or even a certificate of basic hygeine. That would never happen now; the only way you can gauge, from a CV or job application, the level of a person's functional literacy is if they screw up a there/their scenario.

Evidence also suggests that the warning bells of CV-yore have been entirely wiped out by templates you can pull off the internet. It used to be so simple: if someone had no hobbies, no ambition and no skills, and did not seem actually to be alive, it was fair to think that you wouldn't want to employ them. Sure, the others might be lying, but at least they'd have shown the gumption to pretend that they were fluent in French and that they could acquit themselves in the brass section of a provincial orchestra. Now everybody has motivation, hobbies and a history of excellence going back to when they were four. You find this stuff on the information superhighway.

The overall thesis, then, is that computer access generally does no good for people's literacy and precision. Computers almost never turn out to have done a good turn to anybody. Take any trend of the past 15 years - from child abuse through to this putative illiteracy - and it will coincide with the growth of the internet. Factor in here that negative curves get into the news just on anecdotal evidence whereas positive changes need substantial statistical back-up before they have any meaning.

I can't imagine anything worse than newspapers full of people who just have a feeling that things are getting better and better, but can't put their finger on it. But how, exactly, did bad news come about this status, where the opinions of a tiny, statistically irrelevant sample are accepted with the rueful credulousness they'd receive if they were fact? There is an Eeyore undercurrent to all this, wherein we know that technological advances have meant greater sociological shifts in the past 15 years than there were in the 15 before that.

Unwilling to accept that these shifts might be both positive and negative or, more unsettling, might not even be measurable for a decade, we present a very fertile bed of pessimism for any seed of evidence that might be lobbed at us, never mind that it might turn out not to be evidence at all, merely groundwort (or worrywart).

In fact, according to the National Literacy Trust, standards of literacy remained roughly the same for 50 years, between the war and the mid-90s. Since then they have been slowly climbing, as successive government initiatives (this started with the Tories, of course) have put more emphasis on literacy; the national curriculum hasn't done any harm either. In fact, though Julia Strong from the NLT is keen to stress how much more room there is for improvement, she hazards that the internet has actually improved literacy.

First, email addresses have to be rendered precisely to have any meaning, so the young are, if anything, more rigorous than ever. Second, the web has introduced reading into all kinds of activities - dating, shopping, gambling - that previously would have required very little reading and no spelling at all. So, fake bad news turns out to be broadly good news. Well, it is August ...

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