Northop Frye

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In Don’t You Think It’s Time to Start Thinking, Northrop Frye discusses several issues which face the modern world and our generation. Mostly, he talks about how reading is no longer important for literacy. Its main use nowadays, he argues, is to read every day things like traffic signals, and to read only as much as you need to make money at work. Frye argued that literacy is no longer valued in modern society. Because of this, people don’t think as much and they all have basic thoughts that aren’t unique. His conclusion is right, and this is evident in through the popularity of text-messaging, using cliché phrases, and the shame that adolescents feel in articulation of their thoughts. Text messaging has made a shorthand version of English that many youth are beginning to use as an everyday language. Instead of full sentences and proper spelling, they only use a few necessary words and don’t spell words completely. They do this so that they can fit many things into a limited texting space. Twitter, the social media website, also adds to this habit because it only allows each tweet to be 140 characters long. As a result, words have become less sophisticated and only the things that are necessary are said. Like Frye said, such a habit will create a society that only thinks that the basic words are important, and doesn’t believe in valuing words that would be more complex. Therefore, the same words are used over and over again and new thoughts aren’t made by people. Secondly, Frye talks about how modern people use a lot of clichés.. This means that they only use certain phrases that are widely used by everyone, and hence everyone basically repeats the same phrases and the same thoughts. Frye refers to them as “simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretense to thinking”. In other words, people don’t bother to think of new sentences and new thoughts. They say the ones that have been repeated by many people before, and don’t...
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