"Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade" By Virginia Heffernan, August 7, 2011

Virginia Heffernan, again in this article, remains very opinionated over the matter of how today's education system needs to be dramatically updated to meet the standards of today's technological advancements. She claims that schools need to keep up with technology. The reason for this broad statement she says, is because years from now, kids that are in grade-school now, will most likely not be doing the kinds of jobs that exist today. Technology is rapidly advancing, meaning that most of these kids will be practicing jobs that are unheard of nowadays. I agree with her when she says, "We can't keep preparing kids for a world that doesn't exist. We can't keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they're developing on their own." I like her style of writing and the way that she critiques. I appreciate how she makes broad statements about society, yet is clearly able to back them up with facts and evidence. I also enjoy reading her opinions because they lead me to realize a lot about our society that I didn't realize before.

"The Price of Typos" By Virginia Heffernan, July 17, 2011

I really like how this article, is once again, very opinionated. I appreciated how she said, "Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones." She seems to feel very strongly about how she can't stand typos in writing. She makes the point, that a good writer tends to "see language as a system." I can completely relate to this statement, especially after reading, "On Writing Well." Heffernan also mentions that the rise of technology has both increased and decreased the amount of typos in writing these days. Increased, because people always counted on editors to filter through the author's mistakes but now that technology is so advanced in our society, these editors are not as common. Decreased, because technology now has the power to slightly edit these mistakes during the entire writing process. Overall, I like her style of writing because she takes such a small matter and is able to expand on the idea, allowing me to see more into depth on her statements.

"Television's Curse Was Its Blessing" By Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times, May 8, 2011

In this article, Virginia Heffernan discusses how the "curse" on the media may be an advantage. She uses the evidence of how television often has the bad reputation for "risking intellectual damage." I like the way that she writes here because it seems at first--despite the title of the article--that she is going to prove that television is a bad thing and that it is often surrounded by a "cloud of moral judgement" making the whole world think that the entire media is corrupt. However, in the end she makes the point that the whole "curse" was actually a blessing in disguise because people can't ignore this overall concept. Heffernan states, "Sometimes high moral judgenebt from the government is exactly what the arts need most." She alludes to other types of media, including major motion pictures, music, and books. I enjoyed her opinion on the matter of what television has done to our society and I certainly agree with the majority of her statements.