Righting skils of teh 21st centery

I was reading some posts on Facebook today and shaking my head at the difficulty people have in writing a complete sentence without errors. Why is it so hard nowadays to write correctly? As I thought about it there are many factors that which comes into play. As I said in my earlier post Are we smarter in this age of information, the fact that there is more information at our finger tips don't make us smarter. It surely makes our society smarter but as individual it doesn't.

In the case of writing, ease of information and tools like auto-correction in word processors make it so we don't have to bother writing well, we rely on technology (I wrote techonology, it got highlighted I right clicked on the word, it corrected it and I didn't even bother looking what error I made. I learned nothing out of that.) to correct us and don't try to correct ourselves.

That was factor #1 for bad writing.

Another factor, more specific to writing is that writing has become a quick way to communicate. The quicker the better. There's no time to think about grammar when you're texting (According to auto correct texting is not a word. I don't care.) your grocery list to your husband while driving at 100 km/h to make it through the traffic light before it turns red! I hope nobody really does that, it simply for the sake of extreme exampling! (To my great surprise, exampling seams to be a word according to my auto-correct!)

Writing used to be something done on occasions and it was something people took time to do well. Your mother would go through the letter you wrote to your girlfriend before mailing it (for my younger audience "mailing" is that thing, paper, that you put in an envelope also made of that thing, paper.) and correct your errors. Today, what mother would read all the Tweets of their boy and look for grammar errors?

That was factor #2. I'll leave it at that. There are countless other factors, like being kewl and hype by writing in abbreviations. Y'awl no wut I meen?

For the sake of this article I counted how many times I used the auto-correct. Total count of 7 and 3 of those were words I wasn't sure how to write in the first place that I would have looked in the dictionary anyhow.

Happy writing to all!!