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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
Twin vexations: Cryptomnesia and poor face-to-face communication skills
It looks like modern telecommunication—the web and cellular telephony in particular—has given rise to twin evils: cryptomnesia, or the copying of the work of others without being aware of the deed, particularly among journalists and fiction writers—and a sharp decline in face-to-face communication skills among young people.
The bane of cryptomnesia—“plagiarism” in plain and simple terms—is explored by Newsweek’s Russ Juskalian in a web exclusive last July 7, 2009. “The charge of plagiarism carries a special sort of shame,” he says, then poses this question: “But could some alleged plagiarists…be guilty of psychological sloppiness rather than fraud? Could the real offense be disregard for the mind’s subliminal kleptomania? And if it is real, is unconscious copying preventable?”
Read Russ Juskalian’s “You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did” now!
On the other hand, Mark Bauerlein writes in The Wall Street Journal that based on recent research, young people’s strong preoccupation with social networking through mobile phones, blogs, Internet messaging, and tweets is causing a serious decline in their face-to-face communication skills. “Unfortunately,” he observes, “nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone. [T]one of voice, pauses and the like…are absent in the text-dependent world.” Under these conditions, he says, young people “are ever less likely to develop the ‘silent fluency’ that comes from face-to-face interaction.”
Read Mark Bauerlein’s “Why Gen-Y Johnny Can't Read Nonverbal Cues” now!
