Most of what I am about to write I posted as a comment on a friend's Facebook page. I thought I might recycle it here.
I hate e-readers. Whether people see it or want to admit it, there are HUGE differences between reading a book and reading anything on a screen: differences that I believe are deep and meaningful. Phones and ipads and kindles and such devices are "tools of distraction," to borrow a phrase from Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows." Reading a book takes a certain amount of commitment and concentration, skills which are not encouraged, and may indeed be discouraged, by technological devices. And while I know you can underline and highlight on the new devices, it isn't the same as writing in a book with a pencil. Swiping a screen is not the same as turning a page. Books are real. The words on the screen are not; they disappear into the ether. The "books" on e-readers are as illusory as everything else in the digital world. Maybe this is just me, but books have solidity and a certain permanence (not eternal, of course, but relative,) which digital technology cannot replicate. And my fear is that the impermanence of digital media make the ideas presented therein seem also impermanent and illusory. When St. Thomas Aquinas rejoiced over finally finding the one book he had searched so long for, the book and its ideas mattered. When we can sweep away a whole book with our fingers, when we don't even have to sacrifice a small space on a shelf to its form, we come to disregard the ideas contained therein just as easily. That is my brief defense of books.
To the sentences. These are, as always, from student work, and my comments are in ( ).
- Lay Macbeth says "unsex me," meaning take away her feminism.
- He fleas... (flees)
- This is where the reasonability goes into the citizen.
- ... who told him never to never travel alone. (That wasn't not a double negative, wasn't it not?)
- Hamlet feels be trade.
- The death might bring more angry. (Something is missing here.)
- There were many soldiers disgusted as trees.
- Eventually Lady Macbeth can no longer be sane with herself.
- ... life, liberty, and perusing happiness. (I prefer to browse delight, but whatever.)
- One other note, I feel that Shakespear did terrible on this play (Hamlet). I dod not find it interesting. Shakespear made it blunt and I would not recommend it.
- Hamlet's choices and behavior... led to his fatal death. (Department of Redundancy Department.)
- Hamlet is an imagination thinker.
- The solution to this problem is to have a solution that is broken down into simpler terms so it explains the overall solution. (Problem solved!)
I know this last one was a typo, and it's a little off color, but I had to include it. I laughed outloud.
- The dong willingly disobeyed its owner. (He meant "dog.")
Until next time...
J
