"How does the increase in the availability of information influence life in today's world?"

information or misinformation over the web?

The widespread use of the internet has given people access to information on a level never experienced before. How does this increase in the availability of information influence life in today's world?" (Taken from the Official Guide to the TOEFL)

Invention of the internet, or more concretely, the World Wide Web, has affected human lives in tremendous ways. One of them is how easily can one access any kind of information nowadays. With that, however, come both positives and negatives, of which some of them I will address in the following paragraphs.

To begin with the upsides, thanks to the internet existing, people are able to follow, and be aware of vast amount of events and news all over the world on-demand. They don't have to buy tabloids every morning, or watch newsflashes at a given time on the television. Instead, they can simply open the website of their favorite news magazine anywhere and anytime, as long as they have an internet connection. Therefore, having this kind of opportunities certainly encourages political activism and involvement of citizens in the public matters which is almost undoubtedly a good thing. For instance, in Slovakia, recent murder of an investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée stirred up the biggest public protests since decades, with people demanding transparent and thorough investigation, government resignation and passing of strict anti-corruption and anti-mafia laws by the parliament.

In contrast, there are some downsides of widespread information availability as well. One of them, being unexpected growth of hoaxes and fake news spreading through the web. Large portions of internet users seem to fail to successfully distinguish actual facts and professional, sincere reporting from half-truths, propaganda or straight lies, which they encounter in the cyberspace. That may result into potentially harmful phenomena, such as current trend of parents refusing to vaccinate their children because of the belief that the vaccines do not work and cause autism, epilepsy and even death or recent rise in both on-line and off-line hatred towards individual ethnical groups as a whole based on exaggerating of isolated, anecdotal events and various conspiracy theories. Those can be nonetheless, at least partially dealt with by encouraging critical thinking and importance of facts and science in both child and adult population.

To sum up, extensive expansion of using internet services among population comes as a mixed bag. Still, I believe that positives outweigh the negatives and the adverse effects of misinformation spreading over the web can be tackled rather effectively by the promotion of critical thinking and fact-checking in the educational process.

Peter, the essay you wrote remained on target throughout most of your presentation. The positive and negative effects of the internet on the lives of people, focusing solely on information dissemination is good. However, it created a one sided essay that did not look into the other aspects of the internet effects on the lives of the public. For example, you could have discussed how the internet connected people via social media, but disconnected them as well because they no longer need to physically interact with people. In essence, this sort of question begs the writer to use a compare and contrast essay writing style in order to create a more informative and balanced presentation.

The paragraphs are within the allowable limits with regards to the sentences. However, you have presented run on sentences in every paragraph because you kept using commas to connect what should have been separate idea discussions by trying to merge them into one sentence. While this may have served your purpose, it created confusing presentations that were difficult to follow topic wise and prevented you from creating coherent sentences. This made the cohesiveness of your paragraphs an issue as well.

There is a difference between showcasing your advanced sentence development abilities, showcasing proper and complex usage of sentence structures with an impressive vocabulary when compared to what you developed, which are simple sentence presentations and adequate vocabulary skills presented in a misguided attempt to show off your intermediate and little edited English writing skills.

Your concluding statement, by indicating


created a prompt deviation. That is because the original discussion instruction required you to explain


. When you create an altered prompt statement, you will find yourself getting major points deductions because you changed the discussion theme towards the end or sometimes, at the beginning of the essay.

These are the reasons why, even though your essay is strong in terms of content and information, it failed to make the proper impression in terms of presentation and discussion clarity.

Thank you so much, Mary! I really appreciate your feedback.