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You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.

The erosion isn’t unique to America.

How The Internet Saved Literacy

For students in Jerome McGann’s literature seminars at the University of Virginia, to read and interpret Jenny, a poem by the 19th century British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is to live it. McGann doesn’t require that his students show up to class dressed in 19th century garb. Instead, they must take on a role as one of the poem’s characters through an interactive Web-based software application called Ivanhoe, which McGann and his colleagues developed in 2001.

Students are free to change their characters’ actions, add stanzas and delete others. As long as they provide substantive justification–historical and psychological–all changes to the text are justified and encouraged, says McGann. Using the software, which was developed with the help of the university’s computer scientists, students rewrite the poem and keep role journals, chronicling their journeys deep into the recesses of their characters’ minds. To play the game effectively, they must react to each other’s interpretations as well. “Collaboration is the demand laid on you by this technology,” says McGann. “Classroom work is typically solo. Ivanhoe encourages you to work interactively with others.”