literacy

Books Kept Me Alive In Prison

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This post by Erwin James originally appeared on The Guardian on 8/31/15.

The end of the ban on sending books to prisoners in the UK reminds me just how vital they were to my survival inside, and to the life I have lived since

The official lifting on the ban on sending books to prisoners, which comes into effect on Tuesday, finally brings to an end one of the most irrational and baffling Ministry of Justice policy decisions in recent times. When I consider my life before prison and my life after prison, the difference is so immense it’s almost immeasurable. In my heart, I know that I could not have made the changes I needed to make, to live a contributing life, without education and books.

In 2008 I wrote a piece about The Grass Arena, the life story of former vagrant John Healy who found redemption through chess. “A good book can change the way you think about life,” was how I started the piece. Healy’s book had been sent to me by a probation officer in 1990 when I was around six years into my life sentence and struggling. “Read what this man has achieved and be inspired,” she wrote in the inside cover. I did and I was. Never could I have imagined then that 18 years later I would be instrumental in getting The Grass Arena republished as a Penguin Modern Classic. This book is still a source of inspiration and hope today.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write

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This article by Shane Snow originally appeared on Contently on 1/28/15.

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index:

I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Hemingway. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. That’s when I was really surprised:

Apparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary-schoolers.

Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine.

 

Read the full post, which includes many informative graphs, on Contently.

 

Is Reading a Right or a Privilege?

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 1/27/15.

After almost a year of protests by free speech advocates and famous authors, the UK’s Ministry of Justice is going to give prisoners the right to receive books in parcels from family, starting in February. Perhaps the most curious aspect of this case is not that books, among other items that a family member might send via packages as personal property, were banned, but that this case saw lawyers demanding that law be more nuanced with regard to determining whether books are rights or privileges.

Obviously (perhaps more obviously to those of us who have inhaled two seasons of Orange Is The New Black) prisons restrict what is allowed on their premises to prevent the smuggling of drugs and other paraphilia—and it must be noted that the public library system in British prisons was never in danger of being removed. But this case still feels like a victory for free speech and art in one society’s most limited venues.

And it makes me wonder about our prison system in the United States. I did a tiny bit of research and found out that in Florida, inmates often are restricted to having only four books in their possession, and those books must come directly from a publisher or mail distributor—if a family member attempts to send a book via a package service (like UPS) it will be rejected, just as books were restricted in the UK before the amendment to prison policy.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.