Jones article was followed by The Ages own opinion in its Editorial ‘Literacy levels a national scandal’(4/2/99). Its byline and the use of ‘national scandal’ immediately informs us of the situation. It draws the reader in ‘If you can read this sentence .’ which of course its readers can, implying you’re lucky not like the ‘nearly half .between 18 and 64 (who) have poor literacy skillss ‘ ( Note the slight discerpency between this and Jones 15 and 64) The introduction is similar to Joes’ but the actual article uses the statistics differently. Alarm is established in the introductory paragraph,we are’accustomed to regard basic literacy as virtually universal among adults’ so ‘the figure is astonishing and the survey contains .disturbing revelations.’ Admittedly it acknowledges the source and that it’s based ‘on about 9000 Australians .’ but there’s no questioning the limitations of such a survey because it’s used in this context to add authorisation to the ‘national scandal.’
It deliberately and directly attacks the primary teachers, acknowledging that all teachers ‘had much higher literacy levels than the population at large’ which sets up an ‘us versus them’ atmosphere. But what it does moreso is to set alarm bells ringing for those readers concerned about this situation. If primary teachers only had ‘42%’ with ‘adequate skills’ and ‘16% ..had poor skills ‘ then that implies that the rest of the population is worse.