Soap Box

When it comes to education - by today's standards - I am way behind the curve. Things like digital technology and "the new math" came along long after I had picked up my high school diploma, along with the other 21 graduates in the class of 1955 of Goldston High School.

Some of the young men and women I graduated with went on to college, but I began a job about two weeks after graduation and have been at it ever since.

I never excelled in any of the subjects I studied in my twelve years in school, but thanks to a shortage of manpower during World War II, when long retired teachers were asked to return to teaching, teachers who taught the Three �R�s�, reading, writing and arithmetic. In my first grade year I got an excellent grounding in the basics, phonetics, simple math and the ability to retain, at least the most important parts of what I was taught.

That early encounter with common sense education kept me in good stead in my school years and, no matter how convoluted or difficult academics became, I approached it from the direction of phonetic pronunciation and 2+2=4 mathematic deductions.

I was never good at math, hated it in fact, and barely scraped by, but I loved to read and due to my comprehension level I did well in English, not so much during the first semester when we diagramed sentences and learned punctuation, but during the second semester when we studied literature.

As I said, I loved to read and did so voraciously, unruffled by even the gothic verbiage of The Bard, I plowed into Macbeth, reviled by his treachery, feeling Lady Macbeth's pain and developing a lifelong admiration for Shakespeare's masterful command of the language, his unique turn of phrase and poetic ability to turn the most mundane of sentences into a thing of beauty.

But when you get to the heart of the matter, the written word, whether the classic passages of William Shakespeare or the gutsy street talk of Mickey Spillane, the point of the whole thing is to communicate.

Without communication all is for naught.

It seems to me there is a serious dearth of technical writers who are able to communicate when it comes to instructions included with any kind of gadget that requires anything more than plugging in, and even that process can be muddied up by voluminous instructions in the accompanying manual.

First of all, they are usually printed in at least three languages and the first ten pages are pictures, diagrams and whole paragraphs warning you about what will happen if the product is submerged in water or dropped on a hard surface from a great height.

When - after great perseverance - you finally locate the directions, it resembles something akin to assembling an atomic bomb or something that would be used on the space shuttle, and that's only the instructions on how to put it together.

Just wait until you get to the part about operating the danged thing.

The point I'm making is, why can't there just be cut to the chase, plain language instructions that it doesn't take a genius - or a twelve year old - to understand.

Why can't it be like a recorder I once bought that contained the difficult, convoluted instructions but there was a caveat at the end.

"If you don't like following assembly instructions, insert the batteries and turn the device on."

Now that's some technical I can get behind.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels