Text Processing: Affects and Impacts

There used to be a time, probably back in my great great grandmothers' schooling years, when textbooks consisted of ninety percent words on a page and the other ten percent was diagrams and drawings. Certainly, efforts were minimally made, through the written text process, to help children create visuals to better understand what they were reading.

Although, one thing is undeniable...educators back then were a little more hands on with their teaching as compared to today's educators. Teachers took students on road trips, encouraged participation in science experiments, and related teachings to personal experiences on a regular, almost daily, basis. It was a time when students could learn at their own pace.

Today, however, things have changed. With the coming of the Internet, web casts, blogging, and online education, children are being faced with an education that is less hands on and more "virtual" on, with a lot shorter time to learn things. Children are now able to watch a science experiment in a classroom across the other side of the world; they can click on a link that brings them to pronunciations for words in a foreign language; or they can skim through other students essays to get a better understand of Shakespeare’s plays.

In relation to publishing over the internet and the ability of students to process the text that they are reading, we have entered a time in education history where it has become very important for web authors to be extremely familiar with micro and macro-structures. Not only do web authors have to take these structures into consideration when writing, they also have to make sure that the sites they are creating are visually appealing and easy to navigate. What must not be forgotten by web authors is that throughout students schooling years, they are taught “shortcuts” in relation to reading. Skimming through articles and picking out the topic sentence or glancing at the paragraph headings has become a very important part of helping a student to figure out whether an article or paper is of any significance to their studies.

Students today are faced with a wealth of information being shot their way, and if web authors do not take into consideration the importance of writing a visually appealing and structurally sound article or paper, it is likely that their published material will be passed up, even if it is of great importance to a students learning process.