Hector's Best Writing

Hector Flores

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Best writing

Technological Tools

Years ago, people used to write letters, sometimes with horrible grammatical mistakes, that could take a long time to be read by the receiver. People invented and wrote new words that probably no one knew because there were no enough accessible dictionaries to find out a meaning of those new words. A long time ago, families had to travel by horses, camels, donkeys and ships- for days if they wanted to see their loved ones. Meanwhile, nowadays we just have to own a computer, or even better a smart phone, to do all those things that used to waste people’s time and money.

I am a 21-year-old guy who is learning English as a second language. In my long way to learn, I have the technology as one of my best allies. My phone helps me to learn with applications. For example, Google Translate is an awesome application invented by Google Inc. to help people around the world who want to learn a language different from their native one. This application teaches me how to write (giving me synonyms, adverbs, nouns and verbs from a single word) and pronounce a Spanish word or phrases in English.

Another application that I like to keep in my phone is The Free Dictionary.com, an American online dictionary and encyclopedia that gathers information from a variety of sources. This one gives me exactly the meaning of those words that I don’t know. For example, about a month ago, teacher Heidi told me to read chapter three of a book called An American Plague. That day I went home, and while I was reading, many words interrupted my reading, words that I didn’t know such as “miffed’ and “merely”. I touched my iPhone’s screen and looked for The Free Dictionary.com’s app, and bingo!!... I found the meaning of those words, so I continued reading, understanding completely the sense of the story.

The computer is another technological tool used by me to learn. This device helps me to type my essays in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word corrects my writing, underlining words when I am wrong with their spelling or punctuation. This kind of system has helped also type this piece of writing. For example, I wrote many times “writting”, which is incorrect for its spelling, and Word corrected it automatically; that’s wonderful. The computer is also an aid when I have to post my homework on Blogger. This is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries, but in my case it helps to share my essays with my class so they can read it.

Definitely, technology can help us to improve and look forward. Thanks to all this technological progress, we are her, we can find cures for so many diseases and we are as smart as we want to be. For someone like me, it will help me a lot, and I will try to just use its benefits to become smarter every day.