Rants on Literacies: Whose job is it to communicate well, anyway?!

Children spend an exorbitant amount of time learning to read and write. For such a foundational skill, it’s a right pain to learn, let alone master. Adults only fare so much better, with general communications aiming for a middle school level.

Sit with that a moment. My child is in middle school, so I have a direct example of what this age and skill level looks like. Sure, he blasts through fiction, but those Python books? He’s totally bouncing around and hitting Google for some video versions. Most adults function this way as well – favoring a variety of modes to achieve understanding. So, why do we fail to take this into account when we present data and discuss the ability to read charts (graphicacy)?

What even is literacy?

Literacy isn’t one thing, but many. It includes word recognition, decoding, making meaning, and evaluating the work. 3rd grade marks a critical point in reading. Skills at this focus on recognizing letters, beginning and ending sounds, building sight words, and developing word comprehension. One macro-study of results found early reading development development builds like these slopes. I’ve called out the differences between the end (spring) of 1st grade and 3rd grade.

Readers of English and other alphabet-driven languages generally learn some level of phonics to read. (Insert long side-note that not ALL readers use phonics, myself being one of them.) With words like “wound,” alphabets don’t always map consistently to sounds – is it an injury or an action? Read aloud if it helps: “I wound a bandage around the wound.” Linguists call this a deep orthography – letters are repurposed, compounded, clustered, and silenced to make reading that much harder. Blame history and loan words for this.

Notice how in 1st grade, 8% of kids are missing the ending sounds, the -ings, -ed, -ights, and silent e’s that slow early reading. Sight words are building rapidly in 1st grade and generally solidify by 3rd. Word comprehension follows as these systems of identifying sound and shape mature. That’s 4 years to reading enough words to just get somewhere.

Later skills focus on sentence and larger textual understanding. This is how we make meaning of what we read, which relies on contextual clues, inferencing, and extrapolation. It’s also why you can read phrases like “wound a bandage around the wound” correctly. Later stages focus on evaluation – the bread and butter of truly understanding what you read. This is after at least 9 years of training on literacy.

By 8th grade, 20% of students are still potentially failing the “wound the bandage around the wound” example. This skill requires saccades (tiny eye movements) that glance ahead and correctly predict the role of the word – the verb versus the object – which affects the sound. Later skills help people relate to the text and decide its goals. This, folks, is the level we aim for in general communications in the US and other places.

The Literacy Gap

The US has historically noted around a 99% literacy rate for people ages 15+. Other countries, like Somalia, document only a 54% rate in 2022. War and varied writing systems factor into this. In 1972, Somalia adopted the Latin script formally, while having used a variety of writing scripts, including Arabic.

Countries with evolving literacy skills rely on a variety of ways to communicate, including the use of images and vocabularies that may be encountered. This Quartz piece highlights how illustrations fill the void of literacy in Somalia – images along words in several languages help fill the gap.

For readers of this blog, your writing system likely matches the language you use on the regular. Exceptions absolutely exist – of the roughly 7,000 known languages (Ethnologue), between 3,600 (ScriptSource) to 3,800 (Wikipedia) make use of a known writing system. In the modern world, you likely read daily. You’ve also likely spent at least a decade, if not close to double that, learning to use the written word for effective communication.

Many people read and write in languages that don’t match their primary language. They end up at least bilingual for purposes of education and formal communication. Deaf signers are a common example of this, but countless spoken languages do this too.

Applying Literacy to Reading Charts

Chart exposure, however, varies widely. You – reader of this blog – are in the minority, likely looking at charts daily and composing them often. You may even find yourself thinking in charts, or at least having strong opinions around how data should be presented in them. Most consumers, however, are not producing charts. Their exposure to them is incidental at best.

My child, for example, has made charts at school. Much like putting together a list of sight words, his thought processes to these are limited at best. The thoughts around intent, semantics, and why he would choose a particular chart over another are limited to conversations with me. At his age, he’s often given a specific chart type to use and fill with data, rather than selecting a chart of his choice.

Opportunities to create charts remain fairly limited throughout the remainder of school. Math classes may lean on them for specific concepts, such as graphing line trends. Other classes may use them as one of several tools for presentations, with limited time to explore around how the charts and graphics support, enhance, or contrast with the message.

Many analysts entered the field equipped with a few statistics courses informing chart choices. Programs dedicated to visualization or business intelligence tended to occur more at the graduate level a decade ago, with bachelor level programs still nascent in their evolution. I’ve seen data visualization fall under computer science, design, communication, as well as specialized fields like biostatistics.

As creators, we’re not yet unified. Our methods draw from a variety of sources. My personal practice pulls more from interpreting than anywhere else. Building charts well demands solid skills in numeracy and literacy. Without numbers, there’s no scale or context to size. Without words, charts show a pattern devoid of any real tether to the world. Effective graphicacy relies on both skills.

So how do we teach others?

Being literate is not the same as teaching literacy. I remember reading to children at a homeless shelter once in 6th grade. The few hours I was there was not truly enough to teach, even though that was the stated goal. Expose, yes. Teach, no.

As the parent of a child with dyslexia, I’ve spent countless hours creating tools to help see patterns that are otherwise opaque. We used tools, engaged professionals both in and out of school, and also found great books to read.

One challenge to teaching is time. There’s often not enough dedicated time to teach all that we want. So, what can we teach that gives the most impact, the tools to self-learn, and the systems that enable learning? Do we include these tools in the compositions we make?

Most of my data visualization work is interactive. It allows me to tuck in tools that help people decipher the work. They’re not perfect systems, but ideally they catch more people in the process. I also rarely work with just one chart – I’m often creating multi-coordinated displays or dashboards that include text, charts, and even tables to support users.

When teaching users, I look to literacy stages as an example. How do I build the equivalent of letter recognition first? I consider this the pictographic stage, where b and d look the same to pre-readers. From there, I explore the perceptual attributes – gestalt – but also other features within the chart. Then I dig into the semantic and intentional pieces. What else is encoded in this chart? Why this chart selection over another? What are these charts in this order communicating? These methods owe a debt to interpreting. They center meaning over features.

But, perhaps most importantly in this process is my question to creators themselves: what scaffolds are you putting in to help those navigate your work? How can ease the transition to a truly chart-literate world?

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I’ve taken a long hiatus in blogging for a variety of reasons. I’m slowly coming back. They won’t all be this long.