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If you can’t understand a letter from the government or your bank, it doesn’t mean you’re illiterate. It means the organisation that sent it to you is.
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If you can’t understand a letter from the government or your bank, it doesn’t mean you’re illiterate. It means the organisation that sent it to you is.
When people struggle with reading, we tend to blame their literacy skills. But we need to remember that in its everyday sense the term ‘literacy’ covers both reading and writing. So an organisation which sends out incomprehensible information is itself struggling with literacy. I call it institutional illiteracy.
A literate organisation needs the counterpart of strategic reading. We could perhaps call it ‘strategic writing’, but actually there is a better term for it: information design.
Robert Waller (2012): Graphic literacies for a digital age: the survival of layout, The Information Society: An International Journal, 28:4, 236-252.