Post 6 Chapter 6 The Social Media

Post 6 Chapter 6 The Social Media AKA I feel blue…

Although this chapter focuses on “Learning together” and other related issues about which the author has  commented somewhat before,  from the start, I could not get past the author’s incredibly poor use of the English language; Then, early in this section – this usage got so bad, it earned the following (POST). To boot, while figuratively making contortions with the English language, he simultaneously reminds us that he was/is an English teacher!  Please STOP!  Author Richardson you hit a nerve (figuratively).  So I digress in this particular post in order to ask a question to all who read this book: Should we his advice figuratively with a grain of salt, or more literally with drink in our hand? 

On page 85, Mr. Richardson writes that people connections in the social web/ ways in which people online connect online are literally exploding. “OMG,” my pet peeve – as an actual teacher of English… literally exploding? I doubt it. In fact I’ve just about had enough, Mr. Richardson. Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging clear and reasoned thinking? Instead you have singlehandedly managed to promote murky, incorrect thinking and writing in one fell swoop here. All that aside, you’ve negated key lessons teachers of English and of reading comprehension are striving to impress upon their students to promote keener thinking and closer reading.  One of those key lessons is learning the difference between that which is literal and that which is figurative.

 If the “ways” discussed are literally exploding, then they have been bombed or shot at--decimated to be sure. If they have exploded literally they are shattered. Don’t you mean exactly the opposite? You write extensively about the power of the read/write web and then, what do you do (and have done throughout your book, just not as offensively)? You make a mockery of a basic understanding of ELA. You may also have continued to confuse, obfuscate, and worse, exaggerate to the point of being ingenuous. Literal and figurative are not the same. Literal is real; please, before, you write another book, or even another blog, get an editor, or get into my special education English class and learn the very basics needed to read and write with any effectiveness at all. Please start thinking before and when you put pen in hand or keyboard under fingertips. Another piece of advice is simply: Stop writing. If you cannot do that, then stop writing about being an English teacher and or journalist (you told us both of these facts—both of which are extremely difficult to take seriously. Also, another possible bit of advice: Stick to technology and get someone else to write your work and make sure that person has or gets an editor—would you?

Does this huge “stink” make me look petty? Perhaps. But your writing has been so generally poor with dangling grammatical everythings—plus improper antecedents, and a whole host of generalizations that you do not back up with any sort of logic and certainly with little to no research…. that I feel I am justified in figuratively exploding at his blatant misuse of the English language and what it stands for: higher order thinking – conveying it and comprehending it.

Well, I‘ve made my point.  I do think though that you should take my class and learn that a blue cow can be blue (figuratively) if she is sad, but literally only if she is some kind of azure, or navy, or periwinkle, et cetera in terms of skin/coat. Last time I looked the only blue leather I could find was dyed blue long after the cow was gone; it’s in my living room where blue is the color of the leather sofas.

Oh, did you think I mean meant smurfs instead of cows? Smurfs, literally, ARE blue. Fictional, but blue.