Education Needs An Digital-Age Upgrade

To sort of tie in the literacy factor in this article, Virginia Heffernan talks about how a class of students turned in terrible course papers. The class of students were from Duke University, talked about in the book titled “Now You See It”, by Cathy N. Davidson.

Here is where literacy comes into play in this article and in the book in this quote, after explaining that written work such as papers are given out on a regular basis every semester for students.

 “She questions herself-“What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school — the term paper — and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?” She adds: “What if ‘research paper’ is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?”

From this one can conclude that literacy influences their thought process and their writing style.  Not everyone has the same writing style, and in contrast no one has the same literate skills as another.  This means that people have different views on other’s writing styles and may critique them in either a negative or positive way.  Furthermore teachers and students have different views on each other’s literacy, due to the fact that the teachers or professors learned their literate skills differently.  For me books and pictures in magazines set the foundation of my literate skills because I would associate them to their meaning or their names.  Other people may have been more intrigued by music or art and other influences that set their literate skills.