Thank Goodness for Technology

Writing can be a daunting task at times. Coming up with an idea and having to convey it through writing is difficult for any person. You want to portray the whole experience to others, but you are limited by the words you have learnt. Helen Keller must have had a similar experience to this while writing "The Story of My Life" because she only knew the words Miss. Sullivan had taught her and the ones she had read in books. During her time, there wasn't as much freedom to explore new words and topics, as resources were limited to libraries and book stores. In many of the libraries and book stores, the resources were dependent on the size of the building and the topics the owners wanted to supply. Helen Keller also required the resources to be in braille, which took longer to provide. In contrast, today we have a variety of resources to help us with our writing. We have dictionaries, as well as thesaurus', built into programs such as Word to help us expand and define our thoughts. We can also search for any topic or word on Google and learn about it in seconds. This allows us to have a greater understanding of topics and express ourselves more clearly than Helen Keller could.

Another aspect of writing that would pose a challenge for Helen Keller is editing. Writing on a typewriter or a piece of paper limits the ability to move sentences and fix poor grammar (as you can see in my jumbled mess below). The fact that she had to rely on Miss. Sullivan to help with editing, could have also made it more difficult to identify mistakes if the writing was portrayed to her  incorrectly. Writing on computers in today's society eliminates the inability to change sentences around, you can now write a whole paragraph in one area of a document and later copy and paste it into a new area. Editing has also become easier with spell check because it points out errors that may go unnoticed by underlining the error and bringing it to your attention. Therefore, with technology, writing has become more extensive and grammatically correct.