At 12:11 PM 1/18/00 -0500, Booth, Christopher wrote:
>I concur with Louis here. New things are always blamed for the failings of
>the young in eras when those blaming are perhaps no longer quite so young as
>they were. It is a fallacy, and a silly one. Computers are tools.
 
Speaking as a hardcore geek, Internet builder, and occasional writer,
I'm halfway in the Luddite camp on this one.  The key thing is that
cut-n-paste editing is not the same at all as successive-draft rewriting.
When I'm writing something I really care about, I don't allow myself
to go near it with a text editor until I've done 2 or 3 rewrites; the
passage of the text through the brain seems often to have the effect
of improving both.
 
As to whether students of today are up to the standards of times past,
an argument from consistency suggests that they cannot possibly be; every
generation, going back a couple of millenia, has observed that the young
folks of the following generation are just not up to their own standards,
so why should current times be any different? -T.