It has been suggested by some that the problem of our time, in American culture, in regards to reading can be summed up in this way: The issue is not so much one of illiteracy but aliteracy. It is not that people are not equipped to read. It is that they choose not to. And because they choose not to, they never become good at it.

Though he did not use the terms, C.S. Lewis shared his own analysis of how to differentiate literacy from aliteracy as he distinguish the marks of a good reader vs. a bad reader:

If this is you, then you are likely aliterate (bad readers):

1. You do not read books twice (or more than twice).

2. Reading is not your first choice. You’d rather be doing something else.

3. You don’t find books to be life-changing.

4. You don’t carry the knowledge and experience of your reading with you in your daily life.

Conversely, these are the marks of the literate (or good readers):

1. You regularly re-read books.

2. You’d rather be reading than doing most other things. You fight for time to read.

3. You have had such life-changing experiences in reading that “only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard comparison.”

4. You find that things you have read are “constantly and prominently present” in your mind.

This is where the fight for literacy stands in our culture. We must not only teach our children (and adults) to read, we must teach them to be good readers, who profit from their reading.

Lewis makes these points in the chapter The Few and the Many in An Experiment in Criticism (Canto), pp. 1-4.