CHANGE: Yes It will

The future of electronic writing is will be based on how today’s generation works with electronic writing. Technological advancements such as advances in computer software will play a big role in the future of electronic writing. When talking about the “future”, I’m referring to ten or twenty years from now.

Mankind has made great advancements in the past and will continue to do so in the future. One can look back at the last 10-20 years and see how far the world has come in terms of new developments. There has been an incredible amount of discoveries, more especially in the technological field. Electronic writing begun with the electric type writer then the computer; the use print is fading and everything is being published online. Evidently as time goes by electronic writing will take a step forward, as it has in the last decade.

Today there are many reasons why people will route for electronic writing rather than print writing because electronic writing has become a way for people to communicate instantly as opposed to writing letters which would take longer. Students and scholars are using electronic writing as a way to publicize their work because with electronic writing, there is a greater possibility of getting known easily by a variety of audiences. There are also fewer regulations for electronic writing than there are for any other type of writing. Electronic writing is much easier to work with, which is why it will gain more popularity. Teens and adults use electronic writing as their primary source of communication; an example would be social networking and sending text messages from cellular phones.

Like everything else in the world there will be advantages and disadvantages about electronic writing. One of them being that most scholarly books and journals might lose value due to the fact that there will be no real proof of their validity and where the sources are coming from. One of the better things about online publishing today and will be better in the future, is that it will be accessible to many people; When writing about the future of electronic commerce Aaron Schavey said that “online publishing has the potential to reach a much wider audience, including international markets, at a relatively low cost since the internet is worldwide”. With this said the cost of books and published works will be much cheaper in the future than they are now. This is with the assumption that by this time everyone will be able to afford a computer and have access to the internet. If this happens books and print publishing will be scarcely used.

There are environmental concerns will contribute to more popularity of electronic writing than print publishing. This has begun with our generation, the recycling and cutting down of trees has become a major issue today and it is only going to become more pressing and prevalent in the future. Which will lead to a great reduction of print published works; trees are cut down to make paper and that paper makes the books. If mankind has found a solution; which is electronic publishing, print will completely be abolished. This will be good for the environment but the consequences that will come with the end of print publishing will also be grand.

When writing electronically one has more leeway than they would in print writing. If in the future there are no stricter rules and methods for online writing, the future generation will have a lot of grammatical errors, because what they are learning from will be filled with errors, abbreviations. However this can be argued, if more rules are implemented with the growth of electronic writing. People who will be writing online will have limited room to put down thoughts; this limitation could encourage writers to write more precisely. Their work will be less of drag and there will be less repetition because of limited space which will attract a bigger audience.

Professor Sterling, that teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” people who think like him are the ones that are going to shape the future of electronic writing because now everyone can make their own “rules”. This is also a good example of how it may lead for students to write informally while writing a formal essay or letter. Most teenagers do not think of their e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings as “real writing,” this was the study found by various researchers and reported by Tamar Lewin in the L.A times blog. This is evidence of how the future generation will think of online writing. “As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says.” The question now is will this “seep” in the future? Some say it will not and it is not something to worry about, however this is will be a concern once they will need to write formal papers in college and these errors will constantly show up.

In the future there are going to be new inventions that will help people that are writing or reading online. Like Google search engines will change and all other scholarly databases. These scholarly databases and search engines will be the main source of formal information, they will replace libraries. When talking about the future search engines like Google Kevin Bankstone who is senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that “Google’s innovative tools for finding and publishing online content have been and will continue to be a boon to the Internet’s billions of users, fostering free speech and open access to information on an unprecedented scale”. It is possible that these search engines might become more reliant but then again they might become less reliant because there will be many more search engines than there are today.

There are arguments that electronic writing and publishing will not over run the print industry. This might be true in the sense that the books that are already published will continue to be sold. But less and less books will be published because of this new technology. Books will remain popular among the older generation but as their children grow up in the new electronic environment things will be different. Digital books were found to be more expensive than print books, with textbooks one can re-sell them back to another person but with electronic books you can’t .There are many more restrictions with electronic books than there are with printed copies. Gale Holl in a report about digital textbooks said “restrictions on printing and online access make commercial e-books unfeasible for many students, the. Right now, publishers are on a crash course with e-textbooks. They are expensive and impractical for a large portion of the student population”. If this is the case today they will get more expensive in the future, which would mean that print publishing might remain popular among college students because of their price.

If in the future online classes also become more popularly then electronic publishing will be the primary source for the students taking these classes. Online classes have gained a lot of publicity over the last few years and they continue to be of use to many who do not have the time to go to an actual class. It is only logical that if schools have online classes they will need to provide electronic resources that are required for the courses. It is questionable whether or not these courses are as practical as actually class rooms where there is teacher lecturing. The same questions will apply to electronic publishing. In the future if authors publish their works online will it be given the same credit, it would have if it were online? With these questions in mind author might be more hesitant to publish online and choose to do things the old, familiar way.

The preference for electronic writing is going to be higher for people who have a hard time reading or concentrating. The reason for this is that if most books that are going to be published will be online, and with new technology they will be able to be read for them that are they will be recorded digitally. Most of the wording that will be published online will be less formal than print hence they will be easier to read and comprehend. This brings back the point about the requirement and rules of writing online, which will easier and will make people want to write online. For example when writing a research paper online, one will not need a bibliography instead they can simply hyperlink to where they found their information

Electronic writing will become, a field of study in which one can earn his/her degree in. Top universities in the world have started having people graduate in electronic writing. Brown University had its first graduate in electronic writing just recently, this is a crucial step in the future of electronic writing because if the most elite and prestigious colleges are allowing their students earn degrees in this field, It shows that electronic writing has the potential to become very opportunistic and how value it will have in the future.

People are attracted to images, colors; anything that catches the eye, this why electronic writing will be more attractive than print. Authors will be able to add images that have color or sometimes add sound effect which will keep their readers focused and interested where as for print the only way that there is to use words. This will be good and bad at the same time because there will be less imagination and more precision which in some cases will defeat the purpose of writing. Some of this will make people become less and less creative. The quality of the work will be measured differently than it is for print because most of the time when writing electronically the writers must write their work to trigger multiple audiences. For novels and creative writing many images and sound effects will be added to the story.

Some things will not change in the future whether they are in print or electronic writing. Like having good titles most readers will not bother to read further if the titles are not good. Some other things that will remain the same in the future are things like format how to begin a paper or a book. The length when writing electronically will reduce because, content is more important than length. Electronic writing will be straight forward than any writing that has ever been in the literate world. And the reason for this will be because the people reading online will not be interested in reading 200 pages on a computer. Electronic writing is going to be expected to be shorter than print because it that is the whole purpose for it to be “easier” and more understandable. This is going to create more opportunities for short story writers. Bloggers are going to be given a lot more credit and value because electronic writing will have greater value also. Blogging might become an important profession like journalists and columnists; one will need to earn a degree in electronic writing to be a certified blogger.

In terms of change, electronic writing might not make a dramatic change from what it is today however it is going to expand to be bigger and have as much or more value as print writing. It is always hard to predict the future, but the past history will help because history repeats itself. In terms of electronic writing it will most certainly evolve into a greater field. The world is always advancing and changing and the changes in the world will influence the future of electronic writing. These changes might also threaten businesses like libraries and book stores if the print industry is ended because books are their market providers and without them the businesses will fail. Schools will shift completely to electronic writing and reading, and from there on it will spread to other institutions like newspaper and magazine businesses. It will not take more than ten or twenty years for these changes to take place.