I am a Reader. I once was a teacher. Then a writer. Then a professor. Then a communications manager. Now, all I am is a reader.
I have a thousand and one things I believe about literacy, but in actuality, to me it all comes down to voice. You need to find your voice. You need to learn how to shape your voice. You need to speak.
I will admit here, that I also believe quite strongly in the necessity to having an intimate acquaintance with the rules of grammar.
However, I will also say that I have come to understand that knowing how to write clearly and cleanly, creating a message that fits your audience and is coherent and cohesive, is not all that important to most people I meet...be they CEO's, managers, or line employees. Sometimes I feel like a voice crying in the wilderness when it comes to literacy.
Hence, I am adding my voice to the fray. Here. Now. In this place ... while I still have the time. I've lost so very much of my cognitive function and even more of my memory over the past seven years, since I first created this blog. Waiting until it was the right time to start what I envisioned what this could be, what I wanted to be. Yet all that waiting for something good and worthy only meant losing ever so much of what I used to know. The passion remains; the acumen does not.
Originally, I envisioned this blog to be some sort of repository of literacy education and pedagogical ideas. Now, I simply want to transfer the scattered notes found on scraps of paper from my professor days and the bits and pieces of literacy knowledge still left in my head.
So, this probably won't be the helpful archive I wanted it to be. But it will be what I want it to be. What's left of the literacy professor that I was in a place that will remain when the rest of my mind is gone. It's okay if it doesn't make sense to you. What I'm trying to capture will at least make some sense to me.
Literacy matters.
It matters to me.
I wish it mattered more to the world.
Perhaps one day it will.
