Essay #3

Essay # 3
By Melissa Geneser
Many people believe that student’s quality of writing has greatly decreased in the past 50 years. They blame technology for students “bad” writing, complaining that it is making their writing “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” As John Sutherland (University College of London English Professor) chooses to state. Though technology is a big cause for students “bad” writing these days in my opinion technology isn’t to blame. It’s the student’s irresponsible actions towards the use of technology which is the problem. Technology has become an obsession to most young people; they spend way too much time on computers an phones when they could be studying to further their education. The inelegance of the average teen in my opinion has greatly dropped, because of the lazy attitude they have towards academic improvement. Technology also has another downfall to students and people in general. I find that Sven Birkerts describes it well, he states in his essay entitled, “The Owl Has Flown” “Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms.” I feel that what he is trying to say is that the wisdom and understanding of people has fallen and that we have become a generation that lacks wisdom. Though I don’t totally agree with what he is saying I do find that it is partially true. The wisdom of humanity and the understanding has greatly diminished. We have fallen into a lazy generation, afraid of hard work, “for the harder it is to do the work, the less inclined we are to do it.” (Sven Birkerts) We need to rise above this habit and recreate the work ethic of years ago, instilling it in the next generation after us.