Jen Webb, University of Canberra
On 8 June, with less than a month before the 2016 election, the arts advocacy group ArtsPeak staged a national debate on the topic of arts policy. Minister for Communications and the Arts Mitch Fifield, Shadow Minister for the Arts and Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, and the Greens’ spokesperson for the arts, Adam Bandt, spoke to the question: “What’s your vision for Australia’s arts and culture and what’s your plan for making this happen?”
As each took the stage, he expressed the conventional encomiums about the arts (it’s good for you, it’s good for the economy, it’s good for the country). There is some validity to this view. The Australia Council for the Arts shows that this sector contributes four per cent of our GDP: more than agriculture, forestry and fishing combined.
When it comes to social and cultural wellbeing, the data is also convincing. The majority of Australians (85%) report that art provides them with a richer and more meaningful life; and a majority of Australians report that they read literature (87%).
This supports the politicians’ comments about the value of art to the community and the economy. However, very few individual creators get much economic benefit from their contribution to the arts sector; and this brings us to the second focus of the politicians’ comments: which was to affirm the inherent value of art.
This is a view that sails close to the 19th century doctrine of “l‘art pour l’art” —that art must be without purpose if it is to have purpose.
These two lines of thought bring to light the complexity of art, and the contradictory roles it plays. On the one hand, art is a space of autonomous practice, where creators make their work free from political or economic or other imperatives.
On the other hand, it is an important site for the making and selling of commodities, for the representation of national identity, and for contributions to employment and GDP and social wellbeing. We must make art, for art’s sake; we must contribute to the society in which we find ourselves.
And, to add a degree of difficulty, writers and other artists must support themselves financially. But, as David Throsby and colleagues have demonstrated, Australian writers earn less than $13,000 a year from their creative work, which doesn’t cover even basic living expenses.
The best way to fund yourself is to ensure you have wealthy parents; or try to win the Lotto. More practically, it is possible to make a living as a generalist, producing advertising copy, politicians’ speeches, didactic panels for cultural institutions et al. But this sort of portfolio career is characterised by precarity and deep economic insecurity. Selling a story here, picking up a short-term contract there: it’s not a good option for anyone wanting to support themselves.
It is possible to make a living, too, writing marketable genre fiction — or more than a living. A truism attributed to James Michener is:
A writer can make a fortune in America, but he can’t make a living.
Ian Rankin, an extremely successful crime novelist, says that it took 14 years of writing and publishing before he began to see financial returns. JK Rowling did indeed make a fortune, but her experience is akin to winning the Lotto: that is, not likely (the chance of winning was recently estimated at one in 8,145,060).
If neither the precarious life nor the genre fiction life appeal, a further alternative is to find a steady job doing … well, almost anything.
If this is your choice, you will enter what Bernard Lahire calls “the double life of writers”. In one of those lives you will enjoy stability and continuity, along with freedom from economic want and precarity. But in your other life — your writing life — your daily job spent working as teacher or public servant or taxi driver will eat into the time, and the emotional and intellectual energy required, to write literary works.
Of course there may be little in the matter. Even Richard Flanagan, one of our top literary authors, contemplated taking a job in the mines just to make ends meet; and his earnings from the much-awarded The Narrow Road to the Deep North are unlikely to sustain him for the rest of his life.
This is a bleak picture for anyone eager to build a life as a writer. But the impossible contradiction at the heart of writing, between the imperative to make art and the counter-imperative to make a living, is one that many writers tackle, successfully.
Australia has an impressive list of writers, both experienced and emerging, who maintain a commitment to their creative practice. It’s not for everyone; but if you must write, you will find a way to do it.
Jen Webb, Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Patrick Allington, Flinders University
Odd rules can help shape a writing prize’s long-term character in wonderful ways. But that’s not the case with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, set up by the Rudd government and first awarded in 2008. (In 2012, they also took in the PM’s Prize for Australian History, which John Howard had begun.)
The expanded awards — with separate categories for fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, YA and children’s books and a winner’s prize money of A$80,000 tax free — should be well-placed to be our pre-eminent national literary awards. Instead, they bob on the vast sea of daily politics, occasionally getting dumped by a breaker.
As Colin Steele, a former judge of the non-fiction award recently suggested, the issues facing the Awards include Prime Ministerial interventions in deciding winners, the appointment and treatment of judges, and the quality and focus of publicity and marketing.
I’d add that the name doesn’t help: almost anything — from the silly (The Oi Oi Oi’s?) to the prosaic (National Book Awards?) — would be preferable to the current one.
But the key flaw in the Awards’ guidelines is this:
The Prime Minister makes the final decision on the awarding of the Awards, taking into account the recommendations of the judges.
As Beth Driscoll put it in 2008,
To appreciate the true scandal of this potentiality, imagine the Queen actually choosing the Governor General!
Steele identifies three separate instances of prime ministerial intervention in the awards. In 2013, he writes, Kevin Rudd overruled the judges’ recommendation for the History Award, Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (2012). The Award was then given to Ross McMullin’s collection of World War I personal histories, Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (2012).
In 2014, meanwhile, the fiction judges chose Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People (2013), a novel about TS Eliot and London during the blitz, as the winner. But then PM Tony Abbott intervened to make Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) a joint winner. Years earlier, in 2006 (before the wider PM’s Literary Awards existed), John Howard had intervened to make Les Carlyon’s The Great War (2006) a co-winner of the History Prize.
The lack of transparency around these awards is palpable. Should a Prime Minister intercede for purely literary reasons? Or are political reasons fine? Or “history war” reasons? Or local constituency reasons? Or personal reasons?
Can a PM reject a winner because of a cover image or an epigraph? Is a PM who wishes to intercede obliged to read all the shortlisted books? Can a PM “call in” a book that hasn’t made the shortlist or isn’t in competition?
In the meantime, judges engage in delicate debate and compromise amongst themselves, without knowing if they are actually choosing the winner. This is no clearly-defined two-tiered process – with one panel choosing a shortlist and another panel the winning book, as happens with the Pulitzer Prize. This is arbitrary.
Other complaints about the judging process have dogged the Awards. Senator George Brandis claimed in 2014 that the Labor-chosen panels lacked balance, as no judges were “conservative or even liberal democratic”. He suggested that that his government instead aimed for “balanced panels”, citing as examples Gerard Henderson as chair of the non-fiction and history panel (“conservative”) and Louise Adler as chair of the fiction and poetry panel (“a woman of the left”).
At around the same time as Brandis was complaining about past judges, Morry Schwartz and Chris Feik from Black Inc. protested the choice of Henderson as a judge:
Henderson has a history of incessant and obsessive criticism of leading Australian writers and commentators with whom he disagrees politically … His appointment politicises what has until now been an apolitical award based on merit.
I happen to disapprove of Gerard Henderson’s politics, to the limited extent that I understand them. But any isolated scrutiny of a single judge mainly demonstrates the susceptibility of the awards to the politics of the moment, including the more tedious elements of the culture wars.
In any writing competition, a judge arrives with personal, political and literary baggage, preoccupations and biases. But judges also, ideally, bring a commitment to identifying and rewarding excellence that transcends their personal politics and previous public statements.
In turn, the judges’ collective decisions should provoke productive and passionate disagreement on literary, cultural and political grounds. In other words, in calling for changes to the PM’s Literary Awards, I am not seeking a saccharine or apolitical outcome. A prize’s idiosyncrasies can help define it.
For example, the flawed but magnificent legacy of the Miles Franklin Literary Award stems in large part from Franklin’s inspired stipulation that the winning novel (or play, if no novel measures up) should not only be of the “highest literary merit” but “must present Australian Life in any of its phases”.
The stipulation within the PM’s Literary Awards that a Prime Minister has the final say about winners is equally defining: it compromises the Awards’ credibility, purpose and depth.
That stipulation must go, without delay. To function effectively, the Awards need entrenched breathing space from the government that funds them. They need an unambiguous mandate: what are these Awards for?
And they need transparency. In the context of questioning Henderson as judge, Schwartz and Feik called for a published list of all entries received. In the spirit of critically celebrating the breadth of Australian writing, the PM’s Literary Awards – indeed, all major Australian book prizes – should embrace this suggestion.
In the meantime, I, for one, look forward to the 2017 judges of the PM’s Literary Awards perhaps choosing Niki Savva’s The Road to Ruin: how Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government (2016) as the winner of the non-fiction award.
If this eventuates, what happens next may well depend on whether the Prime Minister is Malcolm Turnbull or Bill Shorten … or perhaps even, by then, a reawakened Tony Abbott.
Patrick Allington, Lecturer in English & Creative Writing, Flinders University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Eva Marinus and Kevin Wheldall
In 2008, a new font designed called “Dyslexie” was labelled “a breakthrough” by the media for reportedly being about to help increase the reading speed of those with dyslexia. It received media attention worldwide. Publishers even announced they were going to publish books in the font.
This is despite there being hardly any empirical evidence for the efficacy of Dyslexie.
We conducted a study to see if Dyslexie is indeed more effective than a commonly used sans serif font (Arial) and, if so, whether this can be explained by its special letter design.
Our results found that the benefits of Dyslexie font were pretty small, and that the slight gain to reading speed was actually down to the spacing of the letters and words rather than the specially designed letter shapes.
Dyslexie’s hallmark is its letter shapes. These shapes have heavy bases which are postulated to suppress the supposed tendency of individuals with dyslexia to mirror-reverse or rotate letters. Dutch artist Christian Boer, who designed the font, aimed to make the letters as distinct as possible from each other to avoid confusion between letters.
In our research we tested 39 English speaking low-progress readers from grades 2 to 6. The children were asked to read texts of similar difficulty in Arial and Dyslexie font that had the same letter-display size, but differed in the degree of word and letter spacing.
Our findings show that the Dyslexie font increased reading speed by just 7%. To put this into perspective, in order to match the reading speed of normal readers at least a 70-100% improvement is needed.
Importantly, the same gain could be obtained with Arial font when we enlarged the spacing settings.
In most individuals with dyslexia, the cognitive problems that cause their reading impairment are beyond the early visual letter processing level. Many people with dyslexia struggle to learn the rules for sounding out letters. In this case there is no reason to assume that specific letter shapes would assist in making reading easier.
Previous research has also shown that individuals with dyslexia can benefit to a small extent from larger spacing of objects. This is because they struggle more than their normal reading peers to process objects that are presented closely together. In the case of reading, these objects would be words or letters. However, more research is needed to validate this interpretation.
Based on our research and earlier findings, it is clear that typesetting factors like spacing can only marginally contribute to reading improvement in individuals who struggle with reading.
To significantly improve reading it is important to concentrate on remediation of the specific underlying cause(s) of the reading impairment, like training rules for converting print to speech sounds.
Eva Marinus, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Kevin Wheldall, Emeritus Professor of Education
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra
When my son was nine years old, he put aside the large Harry Potter novel he had been slowly, but enthusiastically, reading each evening and instead began ploughing through lots of fairly uninspiring books that he brought home from school each day.
It turned out the Year 4 teachers had devised a competition at his school – whichever class read the most books would be rewarded with an end of term pizza party.
The aim, I presume, was to motivate the children to read. It is ironic then that the effect was that my son stopped reading for pleasure and instead began reading for the numbers.
Reading is now increasingly being reduced to a numbers game in schools.
At pick up time, parents quiz each other about what reading level their child is on. Inside the school staff room, teachers are directed to have children on level 15, 20 or 30 by the end of the school year.
Six year olds are deciding whether they are good readers or not based on how many books they have ticked off on their take home reader sheet.
These levels are based on algorithms that calculate the ratio of syllables to sentences, or measure word frequency and sentence length.
The rationale is that these formulae can be applied to rank books on a scale of readability and thus guide teachers to match books with children’s reading ability.
There are two key problems with this numbers approach to reading. First, the algorithms are faulty. Second, publishers misuse them.
The missing variables in readability algorithms are the authors’ intentions, the readers’ motivations and the teachers’ instruction.
These are key omissions, and they seriously reduce the usability of the algorithms and the credibility of the reading levels they produce.
Fictional stories often use familiar and high frequency vocabulary, and many authors use relatively simple sentence structures.
However the use of literary tools like allegory and metaphor, along with challenging text themes, increases the difficulty of works of fiction in ways that are not captured in readability algorithms.
For example, readability formulae give Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” a reading level suitable for primary school students. They may be able to decode the words on the page but comprehension of the book is less likely.
The same formulae may rank a non-fiction book on dinosaurs, for example, as only suitable for high school students because of its uncommon vocabulary, lengthy sentences and multi-syllabic words.
Yet a child’s interest and familiarity with the topic, or a teacher or parent’s support and instruction, can make that non-fiction book very readable for younger children.
As readability formulae are not always a good fit for books, the solution has been, instead, to write books which fit the formulae. And publishers have been very keen to supply those books.
These are the books that our children take home each evening. They are written according to the numbers – numbers of high frequency words, numbers of syllables, numbers of words in a sentence.
What is missing in those books is author intention and craft, reader engagement and interest, and teacher support and instruction.
Essentially, then, what is missing in these books is the very essence of reading.
We have been using the reading scheme system for decades and we still have children struggling to read.
When we use these quasi books to teach reading, we are not adequately preparing them for real reading.
These books, written to fit algorithms, don’t build broad vocabularies in our children. They don’t teach our children how to read complex sentence structures or deal with literary language or read between the lines. In many cases, they turn children off reading altogether.
Children learn to read by reading a book that is a little beyond what they can already read. The gap between what they can read and what they could read is reduced when the child:
We don’t need books arranged in coloured boxes labelled with level numbers to teach a child to read.
Beautifully written pieces of children’s literature will do the job.
Books full of carefully crafted writing by authors whose intentions are to engage, entertain and inform.
Books that teachers can work with in the classroom showing how sounds work in words, and how words work in sentences to make us feel, see or think new things.
Beautiful books that parents can also buy and delight in reading with their children.
The way we teach children to read will fundamentally influence what they understand the purpose of reading to be.
When we teach children to read through schemes that tally their books, we teach them that reading is simply about quantity. If reading is about getting a reward of a pizza, then children are less likely to read for intrinsic rewards.
The claims made for well-written children’s literature are many and varied.
Reading books to your children brings you closer to them, can teach them philosophy and about world issues.
But they can do something else. They can teach our children to read.
Misty Adoniou, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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