ABSTRACT
Writing is one of those taken-for-granted accomplishments in the social and cultural life of human beings. In developed societies literacy, the ability to read and to write, has been treated as a vitally important index of well-being. Reading and writing in the evolving world will be at best optional extras, perhaps finally obsolete. The writing test for children in Standard III at time was to write, from dictation, a sentence from the same lesson of their reading book in which they had just been tested for reading proficiency. To illustrate his argument, Arnold quoted the examination failure rates for the three basic subjects: arithmetic 20 per cent, writing 7.7 per cent, reading 6 per cent. The benefits for writing in these changes were, evidently, small. George Sampson in English for the English, written in 1921, reserved some of his most powerful invective for the state into which it had fallen.
