Thoughts...

[davg2000]

One of my greatest thrills as an undergraduate at Illinois State University in the 1960's was to go to the "basement" of Milner Library, which had open stacks, and physically handle bound copies of journals such as The Atlantic and Harper's from the 1840's and 50's. I didn't do this often, though, because the paper was so fragile. Those journals have long since crumbled to nothing, but surely their contents remain, as digital files. If the digital publishing revolution has had one main strength, it has been its ability to arrest time's inevitable destruction of paper and microfilm. So, the great and less great authors of their times abide.

But we are paying a steep price for this. Here is only one problem: the relative ease of digital publishing has meant the degradation of standards which once made it easier to accept published content as worthy of consideration. Traditionally published books from reputable houses were generally well-written--virtually no misspellings, non-sentences, poor diction, bad punctuation, or bad grammar. Content was proofed. A reader would take such a book seriously because he knew that many others had. Now, anyone with a computer, a tablet, or a smart-phone publishes, if only on Facebook or Twitter. One doesn't need Scribner's or Knopf, he just needs access to the Internet. So, bad writing and factual errors abound. It's tough for a beginning researcher--say a student just learning to write a term paper--to know what is valuable and what is garbage.

I pity an English teacher today. But the true loser is his or her pupil.