Aliteracy—capable of reading, but choosing not do so—is on the rise. A ‘99 Gallup Poll found 7% of us read more than a book a week, and 59% read fewer than 10 books a year. We read books, magazines, and newspapers less and less. In ‘91, over 50% of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day—by ‘99 it had dropped to 45%. The number of people who don’t read at all has been rising for the past 20 years. Many prefer to get info in short bursts, with bullets, rather than in large blocks of text. Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine explains "Marketers and packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating." For effective marketing, researchers tell us that the hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words. Some of this shift away from words and toward images can be attributed to our growing multilingual population. Often business people prefer easy-to-swallow book summaries. Parents pop in a video instead of reading aloud to their kids. Teachers assign a made-for-TV movie like Gettysburg instead of the book it was based on. To Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, “People who have stopped reading base their future decisions on
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