Adolescent Literacy chapter 10

When reading chapter 10 of the book, I was immediately struck by the focus on the literacy skills of what Burke calls, "common people." I started working in EMS in 1990, and prior to that, was a firefighter for a year. There are some skills that I was taught then that EMTs now would not even know of what I was speaking because of technological advances in the field has made some techniques obsolete. Using the above for an example, the literacy demands on the field have also evolved over the last 17 years. When I started, the forms for the ambulance runs where barely a page and mostly consisted of checkboxes. Over the years, the forms evolved into 2+ pages with a large sections for narrative description. Many services are also now moving into computer based documentation. My point is that all areas, even those for "common people," have increasing literacy demands and those demands are becoming more and more diverse as technology becomes more diverse.