Recently I attended a workshop on business writings and I was amazed at the lack of knowledge many of us faced while writing a simple formal letter. It made me think why is it so? There was a time when I used to write letters in school exams, but then what happened now. It is all a result of the tendency to copy and paste things.

Nowadays we are so much dependent on the Internet that a the day google stops, will be the doomsday. We are so used to copying articles from wikipedia and pasting them. The college assignements are just a copy paste from wikipedia or any other source, irrespective of its authenticity. Its rarely that we find originality in todays articles written in colleges or schools. As a result we have a generation which has lost its creativity and has lost a sense of writting. And also its hardly that anyone sees the results page beyond the second one even in a google search. We have reached such a point where we cannot even write a simple leave letter without any grammar mistakes.

When it comes to programming the situation is even worse. Most of the so called ‘hackers’ are nthing but script kiddies. A person might start searching for help regarding some code and finally will end up copy pasting an

entire piece of code written by someone else.

This is a problem that must be tackled soon or else we might destroy the creativity of an entire generation, there is no way we can prevent people from using the internet, afterall it is an ocean of information. But the solution lies in educating students how to use the information. The solution has to start at school level. Teachers should ensure that the assignements given are not a copy paste from the internet, make them read, think and analyse the information from the net. Encourage them to contribute back to wikipedia and other such information sharing websites. Maybe then we can bring back the creative thinking back save this generation from ‘ The Matrix ‘.