Jenn Zaun

Professor Lago
ENG 1500-15
Essay 1 Draft 2
Draft 2
With all the technology that students are able to access in todays age, it is pretty much
impossible to expect them to not use something from the internet as a source. And, it is
something that no teacher will ever be able to control. Even if a teacher is making it a
requirement for their students to use books as source for a paper on slavery, lets face it, they will
type books about slavery into the Google search bar and find books based on what the search
engine says. Its the way the world is today, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. With all that
the internet has to offer to students, it is actually extremely helpful and can really help students
understand the material that they are required to know.
In English classes in todays classroom, it is rare for students to be reading a text from
their generation. A lot of the pieces read are a part of different parts of time and can be
complicated for a lot of students to understand, but we have to read them because they are a part
of literary history. Authors like Shakespeare are still brought into the classroom and students are
supposed to be able to fully understand what is going on in their works but it always ends up
becoming an extreme challenge. Why it is such a challenge is pretty simple: Shakespeare speaks
a completely different version of English. What Shakespeare writes, no one alive today has ever
heard unless they are going to see one of his plays reenacted. So, how can teenagers possibly be
expected to understand what he is trying to say when they are no expert on this old language? It
is pretty illogical to have a student understand a language like Early Modern English when this is
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literally the first time they have ever been in contact with it. And, this is where reading during
the digital age makes things easier to understand.
Without sites like Sparknotes and Cliff Notes, it is safe to say that students would be
completely lost while reading these texts from different time periods. We simply just do not
speak or think like they did. So, when you think about it, students really have no choice but to
sign online and try and find something that will help them interpret this practically foreign
language that their English professors assign to them. Because not every student is a literature
junkie and not every student is capable of reading between the lines to pick up crucial signs that
the author is dropping, it can cause a lot of confusion and a lot of hatred towards the texts. This is
how reading in the digital age is extremely beneficial to students. It helps them understand
something in five minutes that could have had them standing and cursing at the pages for five
hours. For example, Daddy by Sylvia Plath is a poem where if the reader did not understand
one line, they would have a totally different interpretation of the poem that would make
absolutely no sense. Plath actually talks in a different language that no one can be expected to
understand unless, that is, they actually speak the language. Throughout the poem she writes in
German saying things like ach, du and ich, ich, ich, ich which makes sense to absolutely no
one except those who know the German language. So, if students did not know what that meant,
they could simply type it into Google and hit search and learn that this was German. Knowing
that Plath is saying things in German is crucial because it gives the reader a sense of her history
that is pretty unclear in this poem since not only is she speaking German, but she mentions being
Jewish and speaks of San Francisco, Poland, and Vienna. Because she is actually speaking in this
language, it gives a sense of the setting of this poem. Another term that Plath uses is Luftwaffe
in the ninth stanza. Now, when reading this, students most likely stared at the poem saying
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WTF is a Luftwaffe? and thanks to the internet, they easily found out that Luftwaffe is a
branch of the German military during World War II, so the reader now knows that her father was
a Nazi. Reading this in the digital age just gives students a quick and easily accessible way to
understand what is going on in these kinds of poems.
Another way that the digital age is beneficial is that the internet gives students a chance
to read someone elses interpretation of a text. When reading something, every person can
develop their own opinion on it and everyone reads things different ways. Most sites today that
provide writing pieces also provide some type of analysis or some type of a comment section.
This gives students a chance to see what other people have to say. Honestly, when students are
told to read a piece they are going to read it once and come to one conclusion that may be right,
but not completely right. What that means is that they probably miss minor details that they
never even thought meant anything, but when they read someone elses thoughts on the piece
they open their minds and see that maybe they were wrong. For instance, in Theodore Roethkes
My Papas Waltz, people immediately come to the conclusion that the man in this poem is a
drunk when that is never actually said in the poem. Roethke writes The whiskey on your breath
/ Could make a small boy dizzy and the automatic assumption is that whoever owns this
whiskey breath is an alcoholic. But, where in the poem does it say this man is a drunk fool?
Nowhere. Yet, it is easy for someone to be so completely sure that he is drunk and that totally
changes the mood of the poem. If the reader assumes that the father is a drunk, it also might lead
them to assume that he is an abusive drunk in the second and third stanzas. But, that is not
necessarily the case. Going back to making a small boy dizzy, after thinking about it, it is
obvious that any amount of whiskey will probably make a small boy dizzy so it does not make
the father intoxicated in the least bit. Another line that can have multiple interpretations is in the
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third stanza. Roethke writes That hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle and
the quick assumption on that is that his knuckle is battered because he beats his wife or child or
both of them. But, again, that is not necessarily the case. In the final stanza, Roethke describes
his fathers hand as a palm caked hard by dirt and if the reader were to read the poem again
and think back to the battered knuckle and the whiskey breath, it all connects. The father does
not have to be an abuser, he could have a battered knuckle and dirty palms because he works in a
field somewhere and he could just be coming home after work to have a drink, like so many
people tend to do. And, an interpretation that many people might come to is that the father beats
the mother and the son is trying to hold him back and thats why his hand is on his wrist. But,
another interpretation is that the son and the father are actually waltzing throughout the house
and the son is just standing on his dads shoes and having his wrist held for support. These are
two totally different understandings that can alter the mood of the poem from scary to cute. The
point is, there is more than one interpretation to the poem and there really is no right or wrong
answer. But, with the aid of the internet, students can read other interpretations and see where
other people are coming from since a lot of students usually just see one side and think thats it
when that is never the case. Now, they can think their interpretation based off what they read and
then they can read someone elses and after having both sides in mind, they can pick the side that
they find makes more sense.
Also, reading in the digital age is beneficial because pretty much everyone has access to
the internet and the internet is never ending. Because of this, there is a never ending supply of
information so people can literally find all the information on one thing, if they ever had the time
too. And, because almost everyone can get on the internet, it means that there is a variety of
people who are posting their beliefs which means that there are way more views than one could
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imagine and with the amount of different views, it actually might help the reader understand the
text even more. Also, because the internet is easily accessible to everyone, it is a quick way for
anyone to get any information at any time. So, instead of having to go to a library and hoping to
be able to get information in a reasonable amount of time, one can just quickly look online and
get all of their questions answered in less than half the time it took to even get to the library.
Conclusively, reading pieces of writing in the digital age is extremely beneficial for
students. It helps them understand texts that may not be written the same way that it would be for
todays readers. It also gives students a way to read and open up to other interpretations that they
never would have thought of had they not looked it up. Finally, reading in the digital age is
beneficial to students because it is accessible to anyone in almost any place or on any device so it
gives them something they can easily access at any time making it easy for them to find
information and because of how simple it is, it will make students actually want to find out
information.



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Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. Literature and the Writing Process: 10th Edition. Elizabeth McMahan.
Upper Saddle: Pearson. 2007. Print.
Theodore, Roethke. My Papas Waltz. Literature and the Writing Process: 10
th
Edition.
Elizabeth McMahan. Upper Saddle: Pearson. 2007. Print.