The Johnny Denovo Mysteries

As an author, the issues of literacy and book purchasing always interest me. And since I write mysteries, I also like a good detective story. So when the two combined this morning, I had to write a quick post about it.

Yesterday, a friend pointed me to an article decrying the lack of literacy in American culture. The article cited what it called a “University of Dayton” study, in which researchers found:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
• Eighty percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

These statistics seemed shocking, and they would be — if they could be validated. The problem is that in tracking down the source, the significance, academic validity, and overall validity come into question.

First, the source of the statistics seems to be the Jenkins Group, Inc., a custom book publishing company in Traverse City, Michigan. However, among their services, population research is not mentioned, and I could find no link to the research in question.

Next, the “University of Dayton” confusion seems to arise from the fact that the Jenkins Group is cited as a source of statistics in a blog post on Erma Bombeck‘s Writers Workshop. The post was written by Robyn Jackson.

Next, the Wikipedia entry on “Literacy in the United States” cites these same statistics as, “University of Dayton, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop.” The person who entered this citation in Wikipedia is Robyn Jackson.

And so we have research that can’t be verified and certainly wasn’t academic being mixed up as academic research because an academic blogged about it, a newspaper carrying this over as legitimate research, and social networking software spreading the misinformation.

Who is to blame in this? Who’s the perp? I think Robyn Jackson bears a lot of the blame. She didn’t link to actual reports in her initial post or later, and didn’t carefully delineate the line between academic validation in her Wikipedia reference, so it looks more like it came from the University of Dayton than is justifiable. She contributed two sources of confusion into this. As for the newspaper in Seattle that allowed an opinion writer to perpetuate the mistake, it just shows that these errors lie not only in the digital realm, but have haunted communication from the beginning.

The ultimate lesson? Literacy means more than reading. It also means validating that what you’ve read is true, especially when it beggars belief (e.g., 42% of college graduates never read another book after college).