HOW THE WEB DESTROYS THE QUALITY OF STUDENTS’ RESEARCH PAPERS

HOW THE WEB DESTROYS THE QUALITY OF STUDENTS’ RESEARCH PAPERS

                                          - Rothenberg
In this personal persuasive essay, Rothenberg discusses the recent decline he’s noticed in the quality of his students’ writing, critical thinking, and original argumentation due to their increasing reliance on the World Wide Web as a research tool. In addition to outlining the educational hazards of the Web, Rothenberg stresses the responsibility of teachers to help develop students’ critical thinking ability, including the hard work of reading closely, working through arguments, and assessing and synthesizing sources.
Although students often disagree with Rothenberg about the dangers of Web research, finding him somewhat reactionary, they are engaged by the issues he discusses. This essay and the accompanying letter to the editor, “An Opposing View” by Richard Cummins, provide an opportunity for students to reflect on topics that are relevant to their academic success, including the nature of critical thinking; information versus knowledge; plagiarism; and locating, evaluating, and documenting library and Web sources.
At the end of the semester, there is a flood of students’ final papers in the writer’s office or mailbox. Some of them are truly original and exciting. But last semester, the writer found that the quality of students’ papers became worse by using the Internet to do their research. It is easy to bibliography; there are no names of books. Secondly, the material used is outdated. Thirdly, the beautiful graphs and pictures attached have no connection with the writing. Actually, to prepare a research paper, a book is necessary, not an article.
The writer is not against the Internet. He also becomes happy to find intellectual material on the Internet. Search engines will help to find the information just by chance. It is not easy to study every web page because it is not properly arranged.
Writing a paper has become very easy because of word processing. It can correct spelling and grammar mistakes, and readjust the page and the font to make the article look long. But students have become lazy, instead of becoming perfectionists. Instead of borrowing books from the library, and reading them, one can use the Internet, find the superficial pieces, and combine them into one long research paper.
Students cannot be blamed for this because college libraries are spending more money on computer technology than on books. It means the library is indirectly asking students to use the Internet more find the material, copy and paste, and prepare a paper. Libraries were respected as the storerooms of ideas and words. But now students begin to write their research papers the night before the submission date. They sit on their desks and start copying and pasting.
The writer feels that he is to be blamed for the decreasing quality of his students’ papers. He did not teach them to be careful about language, ideas, arguments, and reliable sources, and to trust their own ideas. Students’ attention and reasoning power are decreasing because of the overuse of computers. If the computers stopped working just for one day, the writer would ask his students to read a book completely and to think why copying and pasting were getting easier and writing a good paper was getting more difficult.
      B.A. 2nd year BASTAKOTI 

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