Thanks, Tom! I imagine it should be very interesting to read. I never even knew the existence of Eritrea. Since we can not be commercial on the forum, please "conversation" me with some details on how I can order a copy!
Richard, if you have a look at the thread 'In My Life I Have Lived Many Places', there is a link to Amazon and my book. I hasten to add that Ken gave me permission to post it there, so I don't want to push my luck by posting it again!
I think it's horrible that they aren't teaching cursive writing. I use it whenever I write instead of type. What happens when I have to leave a note telling someone the world is about blow up, and their only chance to survive is to eat a banana. I could even set the banana next to the note. But the school decided cursive wasn't important, so the person I left the note for can't read it, and dies.
I was amazed at my son's 'achievement' he was telling me about their exams last week. He said that he wrote a 1,000-word persuasive essay. By hand. Yes, with a pen! With his own penmanship. I was more surprised than he was. Actually, the students were prompted to prepare during the semester to do research and study. At exams, they will all have to put them in writing by hand. Of course, he did his very best to write neatly and persuasively to achieve good grades. Being granted scholarship this year has been his driving force, thankfully. His previous homeshooling prepared him for that, I guess. Penmanship is still, I think, an endeavor among educators in our school system. It's a pity that majority of the schools refuse that privilege of learning the 'art.'
I agree that most kids now are having a hard time writing in the so called "long hand" style of using pen and paper. The keyboard is getting to be the most common medium of writing. But my concern is not much of the penmanship or handwriting but more of the grammar and spelling. I have seen so many times the improper spelling of YOU'RE which they spelled it as YOUR. Imagine reading this sentence in the social media - I am glad your here now. Another annoying mistake in spelling is that of LOSE versus LOOSE. Pardon me for acting as a grammar police. I'm sure you already know that I am in forums to enhance my writing and grammar. That is why I am very observant when it comes to those things. But not really in English only. Even in our language, those kids have bastardized the spelling of so many words. Pardon for the word.
They really have butchered it. Won't &want, then & than, rather & weather, know & now.... And those are just a few of the examples inhave stored in my "pet peeves" file.
A part of the problem is that people are using tiny little devices to communicate with, so they can't be bothered to use apostrophes or much of anything in the way of punctuation and, in time, these becomes the norm.
That is incredible! How come that writing skill is becoming an exclusive trait to younger generations? This makes me just sad because in my times everyone had to know how to write, this would not pop into mind. A child that doesnt know how to write.. Where has this world came?
Soon grammar is going to be considered obsolete. My children were always taught the skills to read and write when they were real young. My daughter was even allied to smack me in the hand if I let my southern accent start to take over, or if I use the word "ain't"
How long has it been since you received a handwritten letter? I received one the other day on my birthday. It was from a gal out in west Texas my daughter's age. Growing up she spent a lot of time at my place. Both her mother and her father were alcoholics so she spent many nights with my daughter. She has a beautiful hand writing and I wrote a think you note to her in cursive. I really had to think what I was doing because normally I would print. Times change and we do things differently. I suppose a big part of being educated is so we can fit in most anywhere and find adequate employment. I did not get much of an education and I have always regretted not doing so. But then maybe I got all I was smart enough to get. I have four grand kids. Two of them are grown and are doing well in technology fields. The two younger ones are in middle school and high school. I don't know how well they can write or what they are learning. I assume they're doing okay because both are honor students, whatever that means. Both their parents are teachers and again I assume they are tending to their educational needs.
If people nowadays feel unwilling to send an email, much less a handwritten letter, which may have several readings that may not only include laziness? to write it down but also lack of interest to do it. This is why I will always appreciate a handwritten letter over any other form of communication, because it involves time investing and time is the most precious treasure someone can share with one. However while it's comprehensible having the younger generation to writing anymore and being surprised to learn one can do it even in cursive, sounds silly when someone of you age says not being able to do it anymore and point at your cursive writing as "archaic and incomprehensible" pushing you to repeat it in a print way.
Digital words have a far shorter lifespan than the printed word. When you think about how much of what we know about history has come from letters and journals that people kept while at war, in political office, or simply living their lives, I worry that the history of the modern world will be the creation of advertising rather than actual history. One day, your computer will crash and everything on it will be lost. One day, this forum will be gone. Maybe, I'll die or become seriously ill, or maybe some hacker will succeed at getting in, or perhaps there will be a network crash that I can't recover from. Either way, eventually it will be gone and all of our words will be gone with it. Email messages are ephemera, and one day will will learn that Facebook has been bought out by someone else who won't be continuing it. What is the history of tomorrow going to be based on, I wonder?
This is so true and so often forgotten! How many times have happened to us suffering a massive data loss and feeling regret for not having a digital backup or at least a paper written text with the most necessary bits of information what we may be needing then after. And remember another fact, one days is not just about a computer crashing, but what is going to happen when for any reason there is no way to connect a computer to a power supply? Without electricity or other power source there is no access to whatever could be in a digital medium even if backed up.