I can’t tell you how important it is to be able to write. Not from an artistic perspective, but from a practical one when searching for jobs or doing those jobs. If your e-mail is entirely AOL kiddiespeak, or misuses words, you don’t get to the next stage of the interview. If you can’t fill out a form in plain language, or read a paragraph to understand insurance benefits or a doctor’s instructions, or write a request letter, it stymies you in ways that go far beyond just the inconvenience of not expressing your thoughts clearly.

Part of solving this is equalizing the opportunity for exposure: better funding for libraries and musuems, especially in economically disadvantaged communities. Part of this is also making sure we close the digital divide; there are whole libraries online and I know the joke is that today’s technologically connected kids don’t read but reading on a screen is still reading.

Our relationship to readers reading in our presence is awkward. The reader is mysterious. She sends few physical cues of the sort we search for, consciously and unconsciously, in others. We abhor a lack of information about those in our midst, so we fill in the blanks. Seeing a reader alone in a restaurant, for instance, some no doubt think, “The poor soul must be lonely.” The reader, though, has ten thousand friends.