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An Ode To The User-Friendly Pencil

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Old school conquers new school: A personal response to “An Ode to the User-Friendly Pencil” Technology is upgrading itself and is, perhaps, taking over the world. From virtual reality to supercomputers, people are depending more on technology in their everyday lives, but is it necessary? Technology has reached the point where Samsung phones are becoming C4 explosives and 4K televisions do not display 4K quality. In “An Ode to the User-Friendly Pencil” by Bonnie Laing, she explains how a simple pencil that we use in our everyday lives is better than a complex computer that is technologically advanced, and through her ironic tone and economic line of reasoning, she gets that message across to her readers which I firmly agree on. In her essay, she utilizes irony to add a sarcastic tone in her essay, making the essay more enjoyable for readers to read. An example of this is the use of computer jargon to explain why the pencil is the better tool. Laing states how “the software of a pencil is both cheap and simple” (332) and how you can “render it …show more content…

An example of that is how she fought and “wrestled with [her] microchips” (Laing, 332), which is an example of personification. As we all know, a computer does not have human traits nor can it wrestle with the user like WWE; however, Laing is explaining how it gets more complicated the more you use a computer, and I agree with that. A computer is not smart; instead, it is the exact opposite. This is because without a user, a computer is just a sitting duck without the proper programming. It needs to be programmed to perform certain tasks or it needs a user to give it something to do in order to be useful, which is what software engineers do for a living. From taking computer science, I can tell you it is not an easy task, but rather, a hardworking one since we wrestle with the OS rather than the

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