Friday, October 14, 2005
Back to Basics
Despite what you might think after reading articles like “20% of Seniors Flunk High School Graduation Exam” by Duke Helfand, Times Staff Writer, people in the U.S. are still among the most highly educated in the world. In October 2004, the number of high school graduates that went on to enroll in college reached 66.7%, up almost three percentage points from the previous year and almost at the historical high set in 1997 of 67% (see “College Enrollment and Work Activity of 2004 High School Graduates”). Sounds good, but…
It’s amazing how a nation that is supposedly so highly-educated can sport so many people who have such poor reading and writing skills. Often, they don’t fully read something, or read it but don’t understand it, then feel qualified to comment on it. Their comments are, obviously, inappropriate and sometimes even unintelligible.
The popularity of the Internet and blogging should help in this area. After all, “practice makes perfect.” But it doesn’t seem to. Maybe that’s because access is so easy. I was up and blogging in about an hour (I tweaked my Template, changing colors, text size, etc., and implemented some special features). So, anyone who knows how to turn on a PC or how to sit down in front of one in an Internet café can, in very little time, start spewing out poorly written, poorly researched “stuff” to fill up their blog.
The problem doesn’t stop there.
Photos can be posted to a blog. One person actually posted a photo of the placenta after his son’s birth. I only expect to see such things on Discovery Health channel, and then only briefly as I’m cruising through the channels trying to find something aimed at the intelligent mind.
Spammers can post to blogs in the comments feature. There is a filter to help with issue. Now, if we could only filter out the gibberish posted by those who look in the mirror every morning and see a much more intellectual person than is really staring back at them.
Some “Ivory Tower” thinkers are totally adverse to someone commenting on one blog and mentioning that he/she has a blog. To them, I say,
“It’s called Marketing, a cornerstone of Capitalism. Get over it.”
After all, people like me don’t have TV shows to announce our blog to the planet. We have to get the word out in other ways.
Here’s hoping you’ll have a fun time with your own blog. And thanks for reading mine. Read carefully and thoroughly. Write even more carefully and thoroughly. What you post will be out there in cyberspace for a VERY long time.
Copyright © 2005 A.C. Cargill
http://douglasjhill.blogspot.com/2005/02/check-out.html
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