A Commonplace Book

"...[T]here's a worsening in the quality of students' writing...." G. David Pollick, president of Birmingham-Southern College, said in an interview that the Internet and computer tools might be dumbing down student writing. "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."