Education

  The skills of being able to write have again hit the headlines here in Sin City. Jordan Baker’s article, Writing wrongs: ‘Our society is about to hit a literacy crisis’ (The Sydney Morning Herald; 19 September 2020), attempts to highlight the ever-increasing chasm between the spoken and the written word and that this ‘disconnect’ is most evident in our school and university students and aspiring teachers. It seems that writing is heading towards Hades in terms of accuracy, readability and quality. To make matters even worse, Dr Russell Daylight, an English lecturer at Charles Sturt University, asserts that business people, bureaucrats and journalists form part of the cohort struggling with the skills of coherent writing. One can only assume that COVID-19’s tentacles have reached victims’ grey matter or, at least, the magical Language Acquisition Devices in their temporal lobes. ‘Shit for brains’ has now taken on one new meaning/ application and the world of communication is th...