After I went through the whole article, one of the Elizabeth Hill’s main points I think is that the way of recording and expressing information is not just alphabetic writing. There are tons of other ways can do that, such as pictures, maps, music, etc. I strongly agree with her idea and I believe the rest of the methods play a very important role in the literacy of people, which is far more significant than alphabetic writing.

Obviously, new technology has pushed the improvement of extending the range of literacy. If we didn’t have such a broad field of expressing information, we’ll never reach the high standard of living nowadays. That’s because we can use those methods to learn something and to share with others more efficiently. Here’s a concrete example:



There are two different signs on the road. The one on the left shows a clear white right turn sign with blue background, and the one on the right indicates several alphabetic words. If I never learned English, I’ll probably ignore the right one but turn right when I see the left one. Let’s suppose the right sign contains very important information. The audiences of that must be less than the left one, and the efficiency of expressing information is also lower than the other one.

In fact, using “visual signs” in modern society is becoming more and more common all over the world. People are also glad to accept this kind of method because it contains the most natural sense that almost everyone can understand and share with others. With this method, people would also create new things without having any specific knowledge of that, which made the transmission of information easy to achieve.

In my point of view, the higher writing system is not necessarily the best way of recording and expressing information. It may be more efficient to record but not always a good way to express. Like the example I have mentioned above, no matter how important information has been indicated on the sign, if no one can understand that, the consequence is zero. Therefore, alphabetic writing is not the only way to record and express information and not the best way to do that as well.