Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wait...year 5? :S
I'm 11 and almost year 8, in fact I'll be only just 12 when I do move up.

Yay me! 4laugh I'm now 19 years old!

And when I'm not wasting away my time with the Internet, videogames, or fanfiction, I love to read a copy of Bradbury's Farenheit 451 or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait wait wait. This is so confusing! We have fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth (woah, looking at it, eighth is a really weird word!!) grades here. THAT'S FOUR FRICKING GRADES FOR ONE AGE. Our school systems must be really different.

I turn 19 in July. To answer the question, adults are more literate for three reasons. First, they have been through more formal education. Second, they have had less exposure to txt tlk. Their minds cannot decipher the code of the illiterate youths. Third, and perhaps most important, they are old enough and mature enough to take pride in the way they what they put in writing.

That being said, I encountered something interesting in my Sociology text book. Apparently, txt tlk actually started in the business world, where the phenomena of "texting" first became popular.

Finally, I would like to state that early reading ages has nothing to do with literacy. I didn’t start reading until I was in second grade (seven years old) and am now a writing major in college. I admit, my spelling is bad, but a lot of my grammatical errors in typing are not the result of illiteracy, but are rather the result of using MS word too much and developing lazy keystroke habits (for example not capitalizing words because the computer does it for me.)

I'm starting to feel....old here!

I am 26 years old and it was obvious I could read when I was two. I am told that I was singing the alphabet song at eighteen months and my older siblings made it a game to see who could teach me more. (Sesame Street and game shows also helped greatly.)

My mother found out I could read then when I pointed to her shirt and said "baby", which is what her shirt read. She sat me down with my older brother and they printed every simple word they could think of, but I got them all. They even tried to stump me with "Mississippi" and I nailed that one.

School often frustrated me because I'd be bored stupid. I'd rather read chapter books in kindergarden than sit around and play with dolls. I don't consider my IQ to be higher than your average person really; I just had a very early start by competing siblings and happened to be open to learning. Writing is my forte and along with that comes good grammer, correct spelling, and punctuation.

I'm 18. I guess I would have to say that if more adults are literate than younger people it's because they've had more time to improve on their literacy in school... though there are many exceptions. I know people who are younger than me who I consider literate, and I also know people who are older than me who I consider illiterate. I don't think literacy is a result of reading at an early age (though that might help improve literacy). I think literacy comes from reading and writing frequently.

I've been a literate person since I was ten. I guess I was blessed with it because I've been reading books all my life and I've perfected it over the years. *grins*