Portfolio: Final Exam Frame #1

Writing comprehension might be becoming less necessary. This is a part of a point made by Geoffrey Meredith in “The Demise of Writing.” To surmise her ideas, writing comprehension is at an all time high, but is still less than one would think necessary and could be at the top of a graphical hill. I have seen some of this problem in my own personal experience. This could have many impacts on society. The passage I read in Geoffrey Meredith’s “The Demise of Writing” is a valuable read because it relates to something I have noticed in my life, and that could have many consequences and a small amount of ways to stop.

The snippet I read in Geoffrey’s book contained 2 main points. Her first thesis was that “one fifth of the population is functionally illiterate” she explains this by saying that a small percentage of those illiterates are older people who weren’t educated, but a large amount of them are people who have gone through school, but didn’t receive or retain their writing skills. Her second point was that the baby boomer generation was “likely the best educated [generation] that ever will be.” She supports that it was the best ever because of all known literacy rates, it is the highest. She then supports her theory that writing comprehension is at the best that it ever will be by explaining the features of Microsoft Word, saying that they nullify the need for functional literacy.

The main place I have seen this illiteracy is in instant messaging. That seems a strange place to find a lack of writing comprehension, because it is assumed you know how to read and write in order to do it. However, most of the rules of grammar and conventions are often broken by users of instant messaging. Even correct spelling is often ignored, by people opting for shorter or more phonic spellings. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference between there, their, and they’re without a dictionary or word autocorrecting it. While I assume that most of the people I am talking with know most of the rules of writing, I’m not sure how long that will last or be needed.

This can have many consequences, but has few fixes. One of the ramifications would be the obvious, lack of an ability to write without a machine to help. Another problem this could cause is less obvious, the inability of people to articulate their message in a coherent and well thought out manner; this would happen because complex ideas are often hard to keep in your memory, so we put them into a more permanent media to organize our train of thought. Without writing, we can’t do that. The only fix I can think of for our lack of writing skills is to bring back the need for them. Take off the complex algorithms that check tense, fragmentation, spelling etc on our word processors. This would force everyone to relearn all the rules we haven’t used since our last class on them. However, the question becomes if any would go through the trouble to do so.

I think the small view I got of Geoffrey Meredith’s book, “The Demise of Writing” was an interesting read. It presented an interesting thesis and a disconcerting problem in the literacy rates. This problem is all the more disconcerting from my own experience with it. The problem has powerful ramifications and there are few foolproof ways to fix it. It will be interesting to see in the future if her predictions become reality.