Skip to content

About This Book

Welcome from Pip

Welcome, Reader!

Pip the Bookworm waving welcome Hi there — I'm Pip, your reading and writing companion for this course! The world is changing fast: AI can generate a five-paragraph essay in three seconds, and a single TikTok can reach a million people before breakfast. That's exactly why the skills in this book matter more than ever. Let's read between the lines!

Why This Intelligent Textbook

The average American teenager spends more than eight hours a day looking at screens — more time than they spend asleep.1 A growing share of that time flows through short-form video feeds: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and their successors. Meanwhile, AI writing tools can produce a polished five-paragraph essay, a cover letter, or a persuasive op-ed in under ten seconds.

None of that makes English Language Arts less important. It makes it more important — and more urgent — than at any previous moment in the history of American education.

Reading and Writing in a Screen-Saturated World (United States, 2024–2025):

  • Only 33% of 8th graders and 37% of 12th graders scored at or above Proficient in reading on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a decline from pre-pandemic levels.2
  • American teenagers spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on social media, with TikTok averaging 95 minutes of daily use among users aged 13–17.3
  • A 2024 survey found that 43% of high school and college students reported using an AI writing tool on at least one assignment in the past academic year — and fewer than half disclosed that use to their instructor.4
  • The College Board reported that more than 40% of SAT test-takers in 2023 scored below the college-readiness benchmark in Evidence-Based Reading and Writing.5
  • The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that communication and writing skills are listed as required in more than 65% of job postings that require a bachelor's degree — the single most-requested category of skills, above data analysis and technical expertise.6

Global Picture:

  • UNESCO estimates that 773 million adults worldwide lack basic literacy skills, and that youth literacy — especially functional literacy for digital environments — has not kept pace with the expansion of digital access.7
  • A 2023 OECD PISA report found that reading scores declined in 37 of 57 participating countries between 2018 and 2022, the steepest drop since the assessment began, with researchers citing pandemic disruption and increased screen time as contributing factors.8

These numbers represent real students — possibly yours — who can consume content around the clock but struggle to evaluate a source, construct a sustained argument, or distinguish a human-written essay from one generated by a large language model. This is not a crisis of motivation. It is a crisis of skill.

This textbook exists to close that gap.

It is built on a learning graph of 295 interconnected concepts covering all five strands of the Common Core ELA framework — Reading Literature, Reading Informational Text, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language — plus two cross-cutting strands the original standards did not anticipate: AI and Writing and Systems Thinking. Concepts are introduced strictly in prerequisite order, so understanding accumulates naturally across the 17 chapters rather than requiring students to jump back and fill in gaps. Throughout the book, 20 interactive MicroSims let students manipulate arguments, explore literary forms, trace feedback loops in causal systems, and evaluate source credibility — learning by doing rather than by memorizing. The entire textbook is open source and free: no paywalls, no access codes, no expensive annual editions that become obsolete when a new model of AI drops.

A student who completes this course will be able to read a TikTok caption and name the rhetorical move it is making, detect the logical fallacy in a viral claim, evaluate whether an essay was written by a human or an AI, and write a researched argument that a real audience will want to read. Those are not abstract academic skills. They are survival skills for the 21st century.

How to Use This Book

This textbook is designed for self-paced study; each chapter builds on previous material, so reading in order is recommended for first-time learners. The book contains:

  • 17 Chapters covering foundations of ELA, literary genres, narrative elements, figurative language, informational text, foundational documents, critical thinking, the writing process, writing modes, research and citation, grammar, language conventions, speaking and listening, media literacy, systems thinking and AI, and a senior capstone project
  • 20 Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations for exploring plot structure, argument anatomy, source credibility, literary periods, sentence structure, media consumption patterns, and more
  • Quizzes at the end of each chapter for self-assessment
  • Annotated References linking to authoritative sources and Wikipedia entries for deeper reading
  • Glossary with definitions for all 295 key concepts
  • FAQ answering common questions students raise throughout the course
  • Learning Graph visualizing how all 295 concepts connect across chapters

The Learning Graph is especially useful if you want to explore non-linearly or verify the prerequisites for a specific concept before jumping ahead. Use the search bar (top of every page) to jump to any term instantly.

About the Author

Dan McCreary headshot

Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher, solution architect, and educator who has spent more than three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets. At Optum he founded the Generative AI Center of Excellence and led the team that built one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs — spanning over 25 billion vertices — to unify member, provider, and patient insights. Dan's deep background in knowledge representation and systems thinking underpins the precise learning graphs and intelligent textbook workflows used throughout this course.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a frequent keynote speaker on semantic search, ontology strategy, and AI hardware. Beyond industry, Dan has mentored students as a STEM volunteer since 2014 and now applies the same rigor to building open educational resources aligned with national standards. You can visit the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see more than 87 textbooks that Dan has created or co-created with other authors.

Selected Credentials

  • B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the University of St. Thomas
  • Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
  • Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
  • Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences for K–12 and higher education

How to Cite This Book

If you reference this textbook in academic work, curriculum proposals, lesson plans, or other publications, please use one of the following citation formats.

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). English Language Arts. https://dmccreary.github.io/english-language-arts/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. English Language Arts. https://dmccreary.github.io/english-language-arts/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. English Language Arts. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/english-language-arts/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026ela,
  title     = {English Language Arts},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/english-language-arts/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: Foundations of ELA. In English Language Arts. https://dmccreary.github.io/english-language-arts/chapters/01-foundations/

License

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit and share your adaptations under the same license.

References

  1. Common Sense Media. (2023). The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2023. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/the-common-sense-census-media-use-by-tweens-and-teens-2023 ↩

  2. National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). NAEP Reading: National Report Card — Grades 8 and 12. U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/ ↩

  3. Pew Research Center. (2024). Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/01/31/teens-social-media-and-technology-2024/ ↩

  4. Tyton Partners. (2024). Time for Class 2024: AI in Higher Education. Cited in reporting by Inside Higher Ed and EdSurge; see also Stanford Internet Observatory survey data on student AI disclosure rates, 2024. ↩

  5. College Board. (2023). SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report. https://reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results ↩

  6. Burning Glass Technologies / Lightcast. (2024). The Emerging Degree Reset: How the Shift Away from Degree Requirements is Reshaping the U.S. Workforce. Communication skills cited as top soft-skill requirement across degree-bearing roles. ↩

  7. UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2023). Literacy rates and adult education: Global monitoring data. http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/literacy ↩

  8. OECD. (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en ↩