The Simkin, Crews, Groves: Article Analysis

The Simkin, Crews, Groves hypnotized two hypotheses, one being that students in college do not believe that having writing skills will be important to them in their careers, and secondly that students perceive that they are already good writers, when in reality they are not (Simkin, Crews, & Groves, 2012). The first hypothesis was disproven via a questionnaire, but the second was backed by the collected data, the sample size being 140 business students. The data for the second hypothesis was collected through a take home test which consisted of a three part test. The first part was to analyse sentences and decide whether the sentence was used proper grammar, and fix the sentence if there were issues (Simkin, Crews, & Groves, 2012). The
One implication to the university students as a whole are that students are ineffectively taught, leading them to have unrealistic views of their writing skills. The article mentions this briefly, in that students are rushed through the education system without learning proper writing skills (Simkin, Crews, & Groves, 2012). Because teachers in high schools do not take the time to critically evaluate the writing skills of students, they are often given good grades which then builds up an ego. This ego is what allowed them to have such confidence in saying that they were at least average or above. The study proves this by showing that students that had enough knowledge to get into the business program are below average when it comes to writing skills, which would not be the case if they were critically evaluated during high school. This article is implying that an English mark of “B” or average in high school is really below average. Another implication of the article is that of technology. Technology is often blamed as being one of the reasons of falling literacy rates among the youth. The article states that text messaging is degrading the language skills of university students, technology may also be the reason for the reduction in the reading of literature by adults and kids alike. The drop in the population that reads literature from 57% to 47% from ages 18-34 could also be due to technology becoming a distraction. Reading is often an activity people derive pleasure out of, but in today’s fast moving society, young adults would rather spend hours on social media then reading novels, which in turn boosts ones writing and grammar skills. Although the article does not specifically comment on this, it is implied via the statistics of the dropping literacy rates in America. The last general implication also has to do with word