Portfolio: final exam Frame 1

Portfolio: Final exam
Frame 1

Good Old Days Where Wit Won the Grade and not Technology.

What has become of our society in the way that 20% of the population is “functionally illiterate?” How has this happened to the U.S. when we are going through the biggest technological prosperity of our time, and being literate is needed to be able to do the simplest tasks of day-to-day life? Geoffrey Meredith states in his article “The Demise of Writing” that, “one-fifth of the population is functionally illiterate. A small percentage of these are older people with little formal education. A much larger percentage are youths--- high-school and even college graduates, who despite their degrees, cant fill out a simple employment form.” What Meredith is saying is it is not that they can’t read it’s that they can’t form a cohesive sentence or write about something without a spelling and grammar checker.

In essence what Meredith is claiming is that only 80% of the population can write a structured paper using correct grammar and format, even during this time of technological prosperity. Meredith states that, “Even in the United states, at a time when technological “progress” makes reading a survival skill, one fifth of the population is functionally illiterate.” It’s hard to comprehend that 20% of our American peers are functionally illiterate, and yet Meredith’s studies claim that, “larger percentage are youths--- high-school and even college graduates, who despite their degrees, cant fill out a simple employment form. And this is functional illiteracy. The percentage who can fill out the employment form but not understand Tom Wolfe (let alone Shakespeare) is vastly larger. ” He is saying that even though the populace who can fill out the employment forms, most of them cant understand the meaning of Shakespeare or Tom Wolfe. This is because the lack of thinking power used to write a paper now days have become an easy task mostly done by our computer. Our technology has many good uses but it has made us lazy and incompetent in the ways of writing. Technology is a two edged sword that has helped us but also hindered us. This is because we rely on the spell checker and the grammar checker to fix out mistakes instead of actually thinking about our paper.

How might we address and fix this problem is to start writing our essays by hand again, like in the good old days where wit won the grade and not technology. Like I said before, our technology has helped us greatly but it has come as a cost, our functional literacy. I believe this is true because we have relied too heavily on the spell and grammar checker throughout the coarse of five too ten years, and that is why some college students and high school students are functionally illiterate. I strongly agree with Meredith when he says, “this is why the most resent version of Microsoft’s Word program includes not just spelling checkers but subroutines that suggest and correct syntax, grammar, and even paragraph structure. And clearly these are needed.” All I can say to that is, Amen brother! I personally am a big fan of the spell checkers but I can see where it has hindered me in the long term.

Meredith classifies being “functionally illiterate” as not being able to write a paper or fill out an employment form using basic grammar and good sentence structure, as odd as this sounds, I have seen this problem in my house. My dad, who is 49, has to constantly use spell checker and can’t structure a sentence without making it choppy and I is almost impossible to follow his ideas. I sometimes have trouble with my spelling too, and I believe this to be a problem because the spell checker doesn’t help me to learn how to spell, I just click the button and mission accomplished, my paper is done and I haven’t learned all that much.

Ran out of time =\