It amazes and astounds me the way the Internet has changed since I first connected in 1994. It was obvious back then that anything was possible online because there was so much ROOM! I thought it would be a great way to do research but realized it took time to input a lot of data, and it did. Today a searcher can find just about anything, except for that elusive something that you need but cannot locate. Though many hours are wasted looking, the search can take you to many interesting places.
Back in those early days, the only internet providers for the average person were Prodigy, Compuserve. and AOL. I tried them all, but ended up using AOL for a few years. My youngest daughter was a teenager then, and that fact coupled with the limited number of hours one could spend online (like about 4) could, and did, spell financial disaster. Three-hundred dollars later, I put passwords on everything, including the log-in. That didn't do any good - she figured it all out. The next best thing was to disconnect the phone cord (everything was dial-up in those days) and take it with me. I was so happy when unlimited Internet use for a set monthly fee came into being!
When I began to do freelance writing online, I found I had an information deficit. SEO, keywords, social networking - all those terms were new to me, and I am still trying to figure them out. The whole concept of social networking seems to be lacking in substance to me and I suppose that is because it is so different from everything I have learned in life. Kind of like what many freelancers do when writing an article. Instead of diligently researching many sources, including the READING of those sources, and making sure those sources are sound and not written by yet another careless freelancer, today's content writer seems to go the quickest route possible. The result is frequently, judging by much of what I read online, a piece with poor grammar, spelling, and incorrect information. Surely the educational system hasn't lowered standards so much that correct use of our language is no longer important. I hope not, because the written word is such an important part of communication. The purpose of punctuation, particularly the comma, is for clarification of meaning.
I suspect more than a few English teachers were a bit weak on grammar rules and the result was several generations of high school graduates who didn't know the rules. How sad. That said, mea culpa for any errors I have made here.
1 comment:
Your comment is an excellent example of what I was saying about language and communication.
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