Section 2 Question 2 "The Power To Write."

The power to write. We all possess this power and can indeed learn it if we do not. In primary school you were taught to make your writing legible and when, at last, you succeeded you were granted a pen licence. In high school you are required to take notes, write essays, stories and even scripts and so the power to write is a great advantage. The question is; do we make good use of this in contemporary society?

How many people bother to build properly formed sentences? How many people bother to learn the correct way to spell certain words? Indeed, how many people know the definitions of words over one syllable? The answers to all of the above questions are alarminly low, so no; I don't believe we make good use of the power to write in contemporary society.

An author nowadays could spin you garbage about sparkling vampires presenting, disturbingly, the idea of both necrophilia and bestiality in one series and be proclaimed a best seller. The art of weaving words into sentences and paragraphs to enable a reader to visualise what you imagined is slowly being lost and weirdness has taken its place.

If a student writes a short story about a boy who, at one stage, eats an apple, they may very well write, "The boy was bored and so ate an apple." There is no texture to that sentence, no feeling. Why shouldn't the student tell you just how rosy and ripe that apple was, exactly how crispy it was to bite in to or how incredibly succulent it was? The boy may very well have been bored and a red flash may have caught his eye as he dawdled past the kitchen, but the students' vision will now be lost because of their carefully thought out and constructed sentence.

We now have the power to write and send messages to others over the internet. I now have the power to instantly tell someone how I am through writing and yet, I find myself answering, "gd n u." When I text I am, again, instantly sending someone a written, or rather a typed, message; "cme ova 2dai plz need 2 stdy." Pray explain to me the need to leave out the o in come and the u in study. Many people will communicate this way more than they will write out essays or even whole sentences and, because of that, when they actually need to spell please it might come out as 'pleaze' or 'pleaz.' The power to write isn't going anywhere, but the power to write effectively is deteriorating quickly. Alarmingly quickly.

In the Victorian era a written letter would go on for days and be so beautifully written that you would enjoy every second of it. Words like fathom, affability and comprehend, amongst others, were not seldom seen as they are today. You didn't just 'understand' something, you could 'comprehend their meaning.' You were never just 'good' you could be 'tolerably well' or 'quite faint' and all of this is being lost over time. Gone are the days when people could be described as having 'such affability' or 'sweet tempers,' no, in their place is good or bad. "The boy was a good sort of boy, always smiling." It feels so boring to read that sentence, I simply feel like I'm sitting on a bench somewhere with nothing worth doing and nowhere worth going.

Language is very powerful and misusing it has become the main reason that the power to write is not put to good use in contemporary society. We still have journalists writing about the outside world, but ask a kid if they routinely read the newspaper and I will make a generally safe bet that they don't. The world is an amazing place, full of wondrous stories to tell, but the newspapers have become dull. The comic section is seldom humorous and the latest tweet from your friends is far more exciting. Journalists have this power to write to and for so many people and yet they just deliver the facts. Where is the fun in figures and statistics when you could be retelling the events of your day to your friends without the use of vowels?

An author has a task, capture peoples' imaginations. A journalist has a task, make it interesting. A student should at least be expected to write fluently, but how often do these momentous events occur?

We write to give the facts of the matter, occasionally make our opinions known and to give a point of view. Experimenting with language has become redundant and far too much effort. Only a handful of people in contemporary society make good use of the power to write.