Rebekah Smith The TED talk video I chose was a talk by Sandra Fisher-Martins, a plain language activist, titled

The right to understand. The talk focuses on the inability of common people to read complex information that is needed for daily activities. Some examples include medical, legal, and financial documents. Sandra argues that it is necessary for these documents to be written in a plain language that even common people can understand, because it is a need and a right of the people to be able to understand these documents. I found this talk to be not only interesting and informative about differences in literacy levels, but also very relevant to many things I learned in this class this semester. I think this video connects to an important topic we discussed this year: language differences between classes and between people of different races. I looked back to our reading of The Political Topography of Spanish and English: The View from a New York Puerto Rican Neighborhood by Bonnie Urciuoli. I thought of this article when watching the video, because Urciuoli mentions that when Puerto Rican people living in New York communicate with middle class, typically white English speakers in positions of authority, they must be careful to not make mistakes in their English, or they may be put at considerable risk. This relates to Sandra Fisher-Martins discussion about common, normal people in Portugal. She says that they are afraid to ask people in positions of higher power to help them understand documents, because they are afraid of being looked down upon and being embarrassed. Some people lied about the level of literacy they had on a diagram she presented towards the beginning of her speech. I think this talk can also be linked very strongly to the concept of language ideologies. There are so many different views of language presented by Sandra in one 16 minute video. First, there is the ideologies of the people writing the documents. Sandra says these people are often lawyers or public servants. These people write in a way that only they, or people with the same level of education, will understand. These people do not take into consideration the literacy level of people that will actually be reading the documents. The people that cannot read the documents cannot understand the complex

language these people use or were not educated enough to read the document at all. I think this also relates to what Ahearn said about practice in the book. Many practice theorists define practice further as being imbued with dimensions of inequality. We can definitely see inequality in the practices of reading and writing in Portugal. Some people can put letters together and not understand what they are reading and some people are writing complex documents for the public that most times cannot be understood by the people I mentioned first.