Digital technology has affected every industry in the world from farming to corporate business and everywhere in between. More recently, there has been much debate whether or not these advances in digital technology has hurt or helped in the academic environment specifically. Academic work has traditionally been centered around the individual and what he or she can produce by him or herself. With not only major development in digital technology, but also the major increase in accessibility to such technologies, people now often drift toward group tank work. With this shift from the students, the schools have focused on producing more group-oriented assignments. Many people that this shift causes lack of personal creativity and worsens the critical thinking and writing processes. “The writing we produce is not getting worse. Instead, it is simply adapting to the modern world” (Karp 7). Digital Technology greatly enhances critical thinking, writing processes, and the role of creativity in academic writing.
Digital technology is a broad term for all the aspects that have been developed and affected academic writing and the role creativity and critical thinking play in it. Specifically, the personal computer has greatly benefited a person’s ability to write. Alex Pham, a fellow peer, writes this: “because of how integrated computers are in our lives, they have a direct effect on our actions and thought processes” (Pham 1). He connects how the computer has changed the way we think and write currently from how we did in the past. Before the computer, people wrote one of two ways. The first was by hand, tedious, sloppy, unorganized, and tiring. The second was by typewriter, more professional and organized but if someone made a mistake, they would have to either rewrite the paper or cross out the mistake by hand and write it in by hand, taking away from the professional look. The computer provides word
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