Reading is important, no doubt about it. People who read well earn more money than those who do not, are more active in civic affairs, and are able to take many factors into account before they act. Yet, many people in the U.S. are reading less, according to a new report put out by the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency of the federal government.
What to do? Make all forms of written material as interesting as YouTube or television advertisements. People are reading. They are reading e-mail, MySpace, websites, graphic novels, and all kinds of other interesting stuff.
By their behaviors, today’s readers are telling those who write that they have to do better. Be interesting. Be short. Be funny. Use graphics. Use sounds. Make reading fun. Match reading to the incredible imaginations that so many people have.
The decline in reading is a challenge to writers. Write better stuff. It really is that simple.
A case in point: Children nine and younger have great reading scores. Why? Because author who write for children write TO children. They write what children want to read. The stories are short and fun. They appeal to children’s imaginations. They have great graphics. Many appeal to multiple senses—sound, smell, taste. Many have DVDS that go along with children’s books.
If children’s writers can do it, we all can. It’s win-win.
If I were president, I would do exactly what I wanted because I am the decider. I decide for the country and the world. My first act would be to start a war that would bankrupt the country. I'd follow up with refusals to provide medical care and benefits to soldiers who fought in the war, award contracts for war-making to my friends, reduce taxes for the rich, make the poor and middle class pay for the war, violate the constitution, act as if I were above the law, and put political opponents in prison. I would also start another war with another country just to make sure that the world is safe for democracy.
But wait. That’s not all. I would fire government employees who do not carry out my will. I would neglect roads and bridges, leave millions of people without medical care, degrade the public education system, and devalue the dollar so that we pay more for oil and gas so the people who we are fighting in the war have more money to fight us. I would put my mighty effort into destroying social security so that even more old people will live in poverty.
From my bully pulpit, I would declare that I am doing all of this for the good of the American people. And the world, I would add.
But wait, someone beat me to it. We’ve been there, done that. I guess I would have to something else. I’ve got it. For the first six months of my presidency, I would meet in small groups two times a day with local, national, and international leaders and people most of us have never heard of. I would listen to what they have to say about what is going wrong and what is going right in the world. I’d ask them to tell me what they think could be done.
I would have two other people with me at all times. These would be people who could identify the core ideas in what people from all over the country and the world tell me. After each meeting, I would process what we learn in these meetings with these two people for one hour.
One time a day for those six months, I would meet for two hours with advisers hand-picked for their far-sightedness and humanitarians. We would hammer out policies for dealing the issues that people everywhere have identified.
Imagine that.
