Introduction
Culture is constantly evolving. It is a concept that involves customs, traditions, class, contemporary music, discourse communities, popular media, and more. We can discuss culture from within and outside the communities involved, and our ideas about culture are learned and shaped over time. This helps us to understand what culture is, how we execute what is within our culture, and how we understand others’ cultures. The learning process involved in forming our knowledge about a given culture through the various media we consume daily, in conjunction with our own cultural background, helps to bridge gaps of cultural awareness and, most importantly, understanding through our interpretive ideas based on what we know versus what we feel about a given culture. In other words, it is important to develop knowledge about a culture that you are engaging with, as it helps you hone your analysis of situations that happen within that culture, and therefore make a sound interpretation of that culture based on your own cultural awareness and understanding in accordance with your own background. This is where cultural literacy comes into formation.
As culture is formed through the learning process within and outside of the given culture, our literacy develops within this learning process. The more that you engage with a given culture, the more literate you become in it, whether you are born into it or adopt it over time. The idea of adopting a culture over time can be likened to discourse communities that are associated with specific cultures. If you are part of sports culture, then you may understand terms such as routes and interception. If you are a theater buff, then you may understand the difference between a dramaturg and a playwright. These are examples of discourse communities people can adopt over time as they continuously choose to engage with specific cultural communities. Through continual engagement with a culture, literacy forms by means of a variety of communication modalities. In this way, you can begin to develop your cultural literacy in any media form to participate in discussions within various discourse communities. After developing cultural literacy from within and outside of a community, you can utilize decoding as a method to make deductive interpretive claims about media regarding that culture. As writers have the right to their own voices and opinions, utilizing cultural literacy is a way for writers to be just about their assessment of a particular judgment, and decoding is the layer where writers are able to connect their cultural literacy with their own cultural background and make sound judgments when participating in conversation with their discourse community.
Decoding Cultural Literacy seeks to give writers a guideline for developing their cultural literacy using rhetoric and other analytical and formative tools to examine and compose media as a way to decode cultural literacy for comprehension and articulation. This handbook will show decoding cultural literacy as a recursive process of analyzing media one engages within their culture and then applying the same steps to compose media and perform a rhetorical act of persuasion. The end result is for writers to utilize the rhetorical situation as a way to decode cultural literacy, therefore allowing you to constructively and critically engage with everyday media in order to situate your voice in any given culture’s discourse community.
It is best practice when writing to understand the work you are contributing to, the conversation about the culture you’re engaging with, and the audience to whom you are presenting the conversation. Decoding Cultural Literacy allows you to flesh out the details regarding a given culture through research with the intention of growing a cultural awareness about the community you are engaging with. When you conduct research regarding the culture you’re engaging with and become culturally literate, as a writer, you become more credible. Effective writers understand that you have your own perceptions of other cultures based on experiences such as influencers you follow on social media, video game genres, colloquial book club spaces, or simply your own cultural background. When you bring forth your preconceived ideas of a culture and align them with research, you can assert cultural literacy and participate in the given discourse community through various modalities of communication.
This handbook gives writers a step-by-step guide to decode the faculties involved in cultural literacy and compose culturally literate writing via the rhetorical writing process. Decoding Cultural Literacy will help you understand rhetorical strategies to break down media messages about a culture, assess the construction of these messages, and finally decode them by making interpretive claims, based on bridging your cultural background with that discussed in the media. These same rhetorical strategies will be used to construct equally persuasive writing that enables a reader inside or outside the discourse community to decode the message based on their own background in accordance with what is discussed. Any writer can benefit from decoding cultural literacy, because the everyday writer needs to understand how to analyze the arrays of media they engage with daily and become literate in the cultures of the communities they choose to engage with and provide information to. When writers are building their cultural literacy and bridging gaps between other cultures and their own backgrounds, decoding becomes the encrypted message unveiled by the writer, and therefore written and expressed back to their audience to continue engaging in the conversation. Thus, decoding cultural literacy is a twofold process of deductive analysis plus creating communication that is equally persuasive within one’s own community for continual engagement.
