Computer tools may be dumbing down student writing

August 8, 2005

In one of this week’s most-mailed articles from the Chronicle,
G. David Pollick, president of Birmingham-Southern College, says:

“The style of writing is changing — it’s becoming conditioned by
models and forms,” he said. Grammar-checker features of word
processors, for instance, often mark flowery phrases as mistakes and
suggest bland alternatives, he said. “You start to lose a lot of
artistic and aesthetic quality.”

“It increasingly makes the language a dead language instead of a live
language,” he added. “If a computer model starts to become the form of
communication, then what you end up with is a language that is dying
instead of one that gets richer and richer through use.”


Professors Give Mixed Reviews of Internet’s
Educational Impact
[subscription required] By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of
Higher Education
, (August 12, 2005) Volume 51, Issue 49, Page A32.
[temporarily available without subscription here:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=foniiaqn8iyb9s6tmhdrifo1fphav6nl ]

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