writing

The SATs will now have an essay component. Back in the day when I was writing entrance exams all you had to do was be able to fill in a bubble sheet. The instructions were pretty simple. They even included examples of how not to fill in a bubble: partially filled bubbles, pencils marks outside the bubble, etc. According to a news story on the subject, some educators are concerned that today’s students don’t know how to write. Young folk are so used to sending cryptic emails and text messages loaded with emoticons and other symbols that it may be difficult for them to put together two or three coherent sentences, the kind that professors like to see in papers. It seems that technology has caused the devolution of human communication from forms that require highly abstract skills such as writing whole sentences to those forms which mimic the most simple of speech skills. Many emails move more like speech than writing. Emoticons, for example, do nothing more than replace facial expressions.
The beauty of writing is in the capacity of written words alone to capture, non-verbally, all the irony and figurative qualities of language, all the winks, smiles, grimaces, and eyerolls that would otherwise be seen if you were talking to someone face to face. As a matter of fact, I’m rolling my eyes right now.