On 2005-06-16 04:59:00, Anonymous wrote:
"It answers it only in your opinion. Mine is the opposite. The one that gets his act together faster will have the better future. The kid that started this post is definetly behind in school, proven by his post "I'm one of the kids who made the riot" It's sad thet he writes like that.
I hope Evegeni keeps it together and gets a diploma. Good luck."
Most people write badly. Especially when they don't think a particular piece is important enough to take the time to proofread.
I'm a professional writer. Actually, I'm a New York Times bestselling author. (My book hit 31 on one of the NYT fiction lists for a week before dropping back off, but apparently getting there at all is the thing.)
I don't bother to proofread what I write on Fornits. I like you folks, but I'm not getting paid for this and most people aren't anal-retentive enough to care, anyway.
I've had good friends, at different times, work as instructors at Clark Atlanta University. Once, I got to read through a stack of essays written by the college students--college seniors, iirc--and they were every bit as bad as the posting you're talking about.
There is a reason very few people can sell what they write.
However, you're jumping to conclusions when you assume the teen who made that posting is "behind in school." Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Some people have neurological learning disabilities that prevent them from acquiring certain skills even though they can keep up with no problem in other subject areas. Frequently, when that happens, the person with the LD just acquires a technological assistance device that does for them the particular task their neurological damage prevents them from doing for themselves.
We don't blame someone who's blind for needing a guide dog. We don't blame someone who's hard of hearing for needing a hearing aid. There's no reason to blame a dyslexic for needing a spell-checker, or a dysgraphic for needing a computer and printer, or someone with discalculia for needing a calculator.
We don't want people who *can* do those things to use technological devices as a crutch. But for people whose problems are neurological, TA devices can make the difference between a productive life at their highest potential versus stagnating in a dead end job far below their capabilities.
Since many of these problems are in the frontal lobes, and the frontal lobes don't finish developing until a person is in his twenties, many teens with learning disabilities who *do* go on to be able to learn these tasks and function without TA devices--but only after their frontal lobes develop to the point that their previously insurmountable neurological problem becomes manageable.
This is probably part of the reason why many people's writing abilities improve by leaps and bounds in college remedial English classes. Their base ability to handle the material has improved.
Perhaps the teen you're talking about is simply "behind" rather than learning disabled. But you don't know that and you should have asked first instead of jumping to conclusions.
Failing that, if you're going to flame someone else's spelling and grammar, you really should proofread your own post. It's "definitely."
Timoclea
