Monday, January 27, 2020
Technology: Killing Our Ability Of Writing
Technology: Killing Our Ability Of Writing As the technology advanced, people have changed the way of how they write. Haimran Julka, an article writer of The Economic Times mentions that there are about 245 million of Internet users in US. The number of Internet users is growing at an extraordinary pace. It can somewhat show how much the people like to write on the social media. The new generation is given much more opportunities than the old generation to write by social media. The social media provides an open platform to all people. We can broadcast our views to the world, potentially reaching millions of readers. As long as we are able to connect to the Internet, we are able to write on the social media at anytime and anywhere. Although the social media benefits us in some ways, we should concern to how the social media harms our ability on writing. Because of the everyday usage of social media, the social media has changed our writing style unknowingly. People start to adapt to the short writing style which is created by the social media and the new generation is writing much more words than the old generation. Since we are used to write short sentences on the social media, we change the way of formulate or express our thoughts. We have started to ignore what the basic requirements of writing a formal essay is. As time goes by, our ability of writing long and organized essays has been weakened. The first reminder is what the basic requirements of writing a formal essay are. Complete sentences, correct spelling, well organized and proper grammar should be the necessities. However, none of the above we can learn from writing on the social media. It is common that people would never write complex sentences on social media such as on Facebook status and on article comment. We never try to write a hundred words sharing on our opinions and feelings because no one is going to read that. Everyone prefers looking something short and easy to understand on the screen of technology; no one is going to concern about the spelling or grammar. If I feel sad today, probably I am going to write Bad Day or just put a crying face on my Facebook status. After few minutes, my friends will start to like my status. So, I never need to write a well-organized paragraph to explain what has happened, which makes me sad because no one actually cares. It is not surprising that the short writing style which is created by the social media can be discovered in many other places. When we are reading news on The Wall Street Journal, there are many different short issue summaries and articles for us to read. Once we finish reading an article, we can click the comments button to view the other readers comments and know how they think about the issue. The comments are usually short and not in complete sentences or sometimes even in point form. It cannot be denied that the short articles and comments can reduce our reading time and we can obtain the largest amount of information we need in the shortest time. However, we may feel difficult to elaborate our points or thoughts and write long essays since we are used to this kind of short writing style. Here is another example of short writing style on the social media. According to the New Media Writing, it says college students are fairly accustomed to the course blog, where they are expecte d to summarize responses to require readings, link to related articles, and comment on other students course blogs. It shows that we like to read and write summaries on the social media. Our time can greatly be saved because of the short writing style. On the other hand, our sense of writing long and organized essays is weakened unknowingly. Besides on website article, we also can find another good example of short writing style on the social media. Text messages often have limitation on the number of characters, so shortcuts are commonly used. Some educators think that the shortcuts damage the students ability of writing English. Jacquie Ream writes this on his book to support the educators: The kids arent learning to spell. Theyre learning acronyms and shorthand. Text messaging is destroying the written word. Students arent writing letters; theyre typing into their cell phones one line at a time. Feelings arent communicated with words when youre texting; emotions are sideways smiley faces. Kids are typing shorthand jargon that isnt even a complete thought (8). Everything we use on the social media is short: short forms, short summaries, short sentences and short opinions. We have greatly advanced in the technology of the internet and the technology helps us to save our time. Most of the information appears on the social media is short and it helps us to achieve the goal of time saving. The short writings on the social media help us to share information in a faster way. However, there is always give and take: we are now able to obtain faster communication and the information we want from the social media as soon as possible, on the other hand we are giving up our ability of writing long essays. Besides the short writing style, the massive amount of words which we have written on the social media also harms our writing skill. I find a saying which is mentioned in the Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers very impressive to me, why is it that with young people reading and writing more words than ever before in human history, we find no gains in reading and writing scores? (Keller). Here comes a question: we are writing far more words than the old generation, however, is our writing improving at the same time? Why do people write so much on the social media? Josh Keller has suggested a reason for that, since we have to communicate with others on the social media, it forces us to write more and more on the social media. Since the explosion of social networking service, our daily life has been connected to the Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and the other social media. On condition that there is accessible Wi-Fi, we can write every minute and every moment. There is free Wi-Fi everywhere now. No matter we are having our lunch at McDonald or we are doing window shopping in a mall, we can write on the social media with our smart phones. Besides the easy connection to the Internet, we like to write on the social media because there are no restrictions like sentence structure, spelling and grammar on the social media. In the past, once the people had graduated, they would not like to write unless their jobs demanded them to write (Thompson). We can discover an obvious change on our writing attitude. We are writing a lot of things on the social media but none of them is formal writing. Keep writing informal writings all the time cannot help us to produce a better official writing. The sharing we post on our Facebook or Blogs may look fine in our peers eyes but our professor may have no idea what we are talking about. The technology does a great effort on making writing easier by providing software to detect spelling and grammatical error. The technology brings us many conveniences but it also distracts our attention on the usage of words. We do not have to worry about the spelling because of the great invention of the spelling checker. The spelling checker helps us to correct our spelling by providing us similar vocabularies. We may find out that spelling has become a piece of cake. However, have you ever chosen the wrong word for your essay? Here is an example from Does Digital Media Makes Us Bad Writers?, I feel so necrotic, writes a college student. Well maybe he does have a bad case of dead tissue. Whats more likely is that he means neurotic, but his spelling checker insists on necrotic, so whats a student to do? (Karp). Suppose you are now in a similar situation, are you going to trust your spelling checker or are you going to believe in yourself? Choosing the wrong words has become a common writing mistake nowadays. A grammar checker functions in a similar manner. We are depending on too much on the technology and it weakens our awareness of word usage. From my point of view, this is why we are writing massive amount of words on the social media but our writing is not improving at the same time. Our writing quality cannot be improved by writing more words on the social media. Josh Keller mentions the condition when we are writing to our friends on the social media in his article, youre writing to other 17-year-old, so your vocabulary is going to be the conventional vocabulary of the 17-year-old idiom. We are using the same vocabulary to communicate with our friends on the social media every day, how can we practice our writing if we write just for fun but not for learning new items? Sometimes we may make mistake on our sentence structure, spelling or grammar when we are writing to our friends on the social media. However, our friends are not going to correct us. We will keep making the mistakes and it does not help us to improve our writing skill. According to Bad Student Writing? Not so Fast!, some people may argue that the new generation has developed a new style to share their feelings clearly on the social media while the old generation is still worrying the quality of the new generation (Fendrich). From my point of view, our writing quality has become worse because we are using the short writing style and writing too much on the social media. Its true that the social media provides us a greater opportunity to write: Facebook, simply blogging or e-mail. Also the technology makes the writing process much easier. We can now ignore the spelling and the usage of grammar with the help of the spelling checker and the grammar checker. However, the social media contributes no benefits on our writing skill but weakens our ability of writing long formal writings and word usage. We may think that it doesnt matter to have bad writing skill. As long as we are not going to become a writer, everything will be good. The fact is that bad writing skill can affect our job opportunity and job performance. It is because good writing skill can build up a good first impression to the hiring managers, show our communication skill and enhance our credibility. How do the hiring managers give the first impressions to the job seekers? The managers obtain the first impressions by reading the job seekers application letters. Our ability to write complete sentences, spell correct words, and use the proper grammar plays an important role in building our personal brand. We can build up a good image to our potential employers if we have strong writing skill. Imagine you are now a job seeker. If you receive an e-mail which asks you to attend a job interview, are you going to answer the e-mail in this way #1: Dear Ms. Simko: Thank you for contacting me. Friday at 2:30 P.M. will work well for me. I appreciate your interest in me as a candidate and I look forward to meeting you on Friday! Best Regards, Bob or in this way #2: Sounds great! See you then (Simko). The short writing style #2 is always not suitable for communicating with someone professionally. Besides affecting our image, our writing skill can also reflect our communication skill. In Why Writing Matters, it shows the relationship between our writing skill and communication skill: Good students must be able to understand and then synthesize the information from a variety of sources, both primary and secondary. Once they synthesize information, they must spread it to others effectively. With new forms of communication in our changing society, we must adapt. Web pages, e-mail and text messaging now exist alongside traditional forms of communication such as print journalism and books. It becomes more important to learn good writing skills in order to compose effective web pages, cover letters and even e-mails. These new forms of communication require foundational skills in writing (Thomas). Writing is one of the main ways we communicate with each other at work. Businesses produce many documents: contracts, proposals, and employee handbooks. We have to make sure every party understands the same thing. The construction of the sentences, the choice of the vocabulary, and the usage of grammar that we made help us to clarify the documents. If our documents are well written, we can prevent misunderstanding among different parties and our working performance can be improved. Good writing skill can enhance our credibility. Customer confidence is a key factor of getting success. We all want our customers to think that we are credible. In order to gain our customers trust, we have to show that we are willing to communicate with them with good writing quality. Although good writing doesnt increase the reliability of our products or services, it shows that we are making efforts to communicate with our customers (Rose). Judy Rose, in her article, says, when letters and documents are thoughtfully written and well executed, they say several things about your company: (1) we strive toward excellence in all things; (2) we know what were talking about; (3) you can be confident in our abilities. If you can make that kind of an impression on the people you do business with, youve done your company a valuable service. It shows clearly how good writing skill works on businesses. Bad writing skill does not only damage our academic score but also damage our future job opportunity and performance. People always think of the positive side of the social media. As what I have mentioned in this paper, it is no doubt that the social media benefits us in some ways. The social media provides an open platform to everyone, people can write as much as they want at anytime and anywhere. However we should pay really close attention to how the new media harms our ability on writing. As a business student, I really care about how my writing skill may affect my future career. I thought bad writing skill might only harm my academic score. I was totally wrong. While I was doing my researches, I realized how important the writing skill was. My writing skill doesnt only affect the score of my English classes. It also reflects my image, communication skill and credibility and it can make negative impacts on my future career. I dont mean that we shouldnt write on the social media anymore. While we are writing on the social media, we should also keep an eye on how the social media affects our writi ng skill. We should not allow the social media makes us become unskilled writers and harms our future life.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
American Popular Culture on the Global Community Essay
American popular culture and its effects on the global community is a hiding plain site idea. The United States has grown into an ââ¬Å"I want it nowâ⬠belief system. The United States has somewhat perfected this idea, from our fast food to our fast everything. But should everyone live in such a luxurious attitude, is the United States popular culture and ideal that the rest of the world should live by? Is this just another phase in our modern societyââ¬â¢s history? Lane Crothersââ¬â¢ book Globalization and American Popular Culture shows us the history of Americaââ¬â¢s rise to popular culture power and how most people are wanting to become Americans without living in the United States. But is this what the world needs or is this just another way for America to control the world and spread our democracy. The intention of Lane Crothersââ¬â¢ Globalization and American Popular Culture is to show the reader the connection of American popular culture and the effect it has on the global community. ââ¬Å"By 1998 trade in movies, music, and television programming had become the leading U.S. exportâ⬠¦this was true even without factoring in the economic and cultural power of American brands like McDonaldââ¬â¢s, Leviââ¬â¢s, and Starbucks, American pop culture is a global phenomenon.â⬠Crothers first compares the two ideas, globalization ââ¬Å"â⬠¦the profound economic, social, political, and cultural changes going on in the modern worldâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ and popular culture ââ¬Å"â⬠¦the movies, music, and television programsâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ how globalization seems ââ¬Å"â⬠¦heavyâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ and popular culture seems ââ¬Å"â⬠¦lightâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ then explains how at the end of the Cold War and the advancements of new technologies ââ¬Å"â⬠¦the internet, cellular phones, and small dish satellites television systems have allowed American popular culture access to an ever bigger global market.â⬠Crothers tells the reader ââ¬Å"American popular culture is the latest in a long succession of bidders for global unificationâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ which makes the reader think this book is a personal depiction of American popular culture and the effect on the world. Crothers also, provides the link of American popular culture and global politics ââ¬Å"â⬠¦first is the Cold Warâ⬠¦second is the controversial U.S. Global War on Terrorâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ which makes the reader, depending on their age, if they are American, if they have been affected by any terror attack, have a personal relationship with this issue. First, during the Cold War, ââ¬Å"The Western bloc advocated relative freedom in personal choice, economic trade, and immigrationâ⬠¦the Eastern bloc practiced in state control, the limitationà of personal freedom, and government ownership of factories and other productive enterprises.â⬠This is a defining moment in the history of the world, because when country wants to promote individualism and create an integrated free market, that idea is going to spread more quickly to the people, rather than being suppressed by the government. On September 11, 2001, the United States was attack and the world sympathize with us. A French newspaper on September 13, 2001 stated, ââ¬Å"Today we are all Americans,â⬠but this would grow into fear and concern in the world because when the rest of the world found out on how we responded to the 9/11 attacks. Crothers tells the reader, ââ¬Å"Time magazine asked 250,000 people across Europe which country posed the greatest threat to world peace: Iraq, North Korea, or the United Statesâ⬠¦8 percent said Iraq and 9 percent said North Koreaâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ But with all of this fear which the United States has placed on the rest of the world, people were still embracing our popular culture, ââ¬Å"â⬠¦people continued to embrace American popular cultureâ⬠¦iPods and smartphonesâ⬠¦led to explosive growthâ⬠¦Ã¢â¬ The United States and the popular culture which we have given the world, whether for better or for worst, has brought the global community more informed about global issue. With the advancement of the internet and the high speed that news travels now, would not have ever been accomplish without the United States pressing our culture to everyone. Crothers states that ââ¬Å"culture is not an all-or-nothing concept in which everyone believes the same thing and behaves th e same way.â⬠This is an important statement because, not everyone is going to strive to become Americans; we are unique. Some of your ideals and products are always going to be reacted in different ways depending on the group of people who are receiving it. We just have to believe that most of the culture we are giving the rest of the world is creating a more unified global community. Works Cited Crother, Lane. Globalization and American Popular Culture. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2013
Friday, January 10, 2020
Behavior & Teams
The reading made me realize that group and teams alike have their own purposes. However, I could not help but notice that teams have more advantages as compared to a group. I believe that every teams starts out as a group and after some time they would then on develop into a team. Being a team is necessary if one needs to truly develop and flourish.I realized that people or organizations would have better use of a team than a group especially since in a team there could be no room for someone who does not wish to participate (in contrast to a group wherein a person could just sit around doing nothing at all).The reading also made me realize that in an organization there is both a team and a group. The group should do everything in their power to develop themselves into a team. In a group the individual importance of a person is minimized since Person A could still do Person Bââ¬â¢s job even if Person B does not appear in a meeting. In contrast, a team could not operate without one of their members since a team was developed based on their own personal expertise which in turn could better ensure their success.The presence of dependence and independence makes a team something far better and more useful in an organization especially since in a team everyone could meet in the middle and discuss their own ideas which one could not do in a group since only one person has the power to decide (the leader). The reading also made me realize the importance of sensing the needs of others. In professional situations, sensing is very important so that one would be able to gauge the needs of the teams and resolve the conflicts in the process.After sensing what the problems or the issues may be I should then move on to diagnose what is to be done to resolve the issue and I could better do that by opening the issues in the team. By doing a constructive criticism or the like each member of the team could then move on to contribute what is to be done to better the teamââ¬â¢ s position. We could also tell each other where one went wrong in order to ascertain that such things would never happen again.This is one of the most successful plans there could be in ensuring the harmony in a team which could address everyoneââ¬â¢s need. References: Mackin, D. (2007). The Difference Between A Team And A Group [Electronic Version] from http://www. sideroad. com/Team_Building/difference-between-team-and-group. html. Williams, N. (2000). The Top 10 Key Differences Between a Team of Individuals and a Group of Individuals [Electronic Version] from http://topten. org/public/AE/AE244. html.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Summary Of Salinger s The Rye - 2149 Words
The Theme of Innocence in Salingerââ¬â¢s Novel In todayââ¬â¢s world innocence is a difficult quality to achieve and maintain because of the corruption that exists everywhere among us. Many say that children are the most innocent of beings. However, a child can never be shielded by the danger and risk that constantly encompasses them in our society today. Children are subjected to this world and once they are exposed to the corruption it is difficult to maintain the innocence that they once embodied. In J.D. Salingerââ¬â¢s ââ¬Å"Catcher in the Ryeâ⬠there is an evident need and desire to preserve a sense of innocence among the characters in a world that lacks innocence. Holden Caulfield, the main character in Salingerââ¬â¢s novel, is a force that tries toâ⬠¦show more contentâ⬠¦Although we never find out if anything did happen between the two Holdenââ¬â¢s is furious. We see Holden become infuriated as he questions his roommate about his night. ââ¬Å"ââ¬ËWhat d you do?ââ¬â¢ I said. ââ¬ËGive her t he time in Ed Banky s goddam car?ââ¬â¢ My voice was shaking something awful. ââ¬ËWhat a thing to say. Want me to wash your mouth out with soap?ââ¬â¢ ââ¬ËDid you?ââ¬â¢ ââ¬ËThat s a professional secret, buddy.ââ¬â¢ This next part I don t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open.â⬠( Salinger ) When Holden hears that his old ââ¬Å"innocentâ⬠checkers partner possibly did things with his womanizing roommate Stradlater this bothers him a great deal as he feels her innocence has been stolen, Her virginity being her innocence in this situation. He does not see Jane as a person who is changed or been affected by the world around her, but as his old friends and checkers partner. When Holden realizes that his former checkers partner may not be as innocent as she once was, the idea of purity in people diminishing hits Holden. This is the turning point in his head as he feels it is his duty to protect people like Jane from a dangerous world. Holden takes the responsibility of protecting children from a world of corruption. He calls
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