Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Good luck, but if people weren't willing to read it, I doubt they'll be willing to listen to this. Or...I don't know: perhaps they will. Perhaps this is part of the transition from literary to oral culture.

https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1178797489962520580

I understand what you're trying to do. So few people actually read the report, and without reading it, how are they going to understand any of this?

But something tells me it's a mistake to keep dumbing things down.

This is training people not to read. It's teaching them to be more interested in spoken words with dramatic narrative and a soundtrack than written original document. And where has this cultural race to the bottom *already* led?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will help people to navigate a written work that's otherwise too boring or too abstruse for them. Maybe it's a stepping-stone up to reading the document itself.

And perhaps it's unrealistic to expect people to read something like that report--and yet so urgent they understand it anyway, given the political emergency--that this is the right way to go.

I just worry that by teaching to the weakest students in the class, we're setting that low standard as the classroom norm. If we lose having "literacy sufficient to read that report" as a common norm, we sever ourselves off from our own history, our own legal system ...

I'll be curious to know how it goes.