Euthinasia essays

Euthinasia essays The topic of euthanasia was frontline news in 1992 when a woman named Sue Rodriques challenged the Supreme Court of Canada. Ms. Rodriques suffered from Lou Gehrigs disease and wanted a court order that would allow someone to provide the means to assist her in taking her life at the time of her choosing. Due to this many Canadians began to discuss, and debate, the issue of euthanasia or assisted suicide. Jack Kevorkian has also been a high profile advocate for assisted suicide and has challenged the laws in the US and brought worldwide attention to this issue. The term euthanasia means easy death inducing a gentle, painless death. Euthanasia is the deliberate painless termination of life to prevent unavoidable suffering. Involuntary euthanasia is the deliberate taking of a suffering persons life without the persons explicit request. This is done by administration of painkillers, usually morphine; with the intent to ease a dying persons pain and remove distress symptoms with the understanding the drug may unintentionally hasten the persons death. Active voluntary euthanasia requires the consent of the patient and is putting to death a person who, due to disease or extreme age, feels they can no longer lead a meaningful life. Both Ms. Rodriquez and Kevorkian address the issue of active voluntary physician assisted euthanasia or assisted suicide. Most people I know have had the discussion about a living will and what they would like to happen to them if they were to be in a position, either by accident or disease, they were to become incapacitated and unable to voice what they wanted to happen for their care, or if they would want to have the right to die. Most often the term dignity comes up in the conversation and stories of witnessing a friend or family member go through a prolonged death when their suffering could have been ended sooner. In 1990 the US Supreme Court ruled that people who...

Spelling Reform and the Writer

Spelling Reform and the Writer Spelling Reform and the Writer Spelling Reform and the Writer By Maeve Maddox A reader, responding to Case of the Missing is: foliage, verbiage, miniature , asks reasonably: Can’t we change the spelling? Before the widespread use of dictionaries, the answer to this question would have been Of course we can! Not anymore. The free and easy use of personal spellings to convey the pronunciation of the word intended by the person writing has not been an option since the middle of the seventeenth centuryat least not for writers who wish to avoid having their credibility questioned. Attempts to regularize English spelling began as long ago as the 1550s and reform groups are still at it. Some of the suggestions would require quite a learning curve. Reformer Thomas Smith (1568) increased the alphabet to 34 letters and put marks over all the long vowels. John Hart (1570) added special characters for sounds that dont have letters in the English alphabet, such as /ch/ and /sh/. William Bullokar (1580) created a system that made use of extra letters, accents, apostrophes, and various hooks above and below letters. Printer Ben Franklin promoted spelling reform by having a special font cut with extra symbols, and efforts have been made in more recent times to change spelling to conform to pronunciation. In 1898 the National Education Association adopted 12 simplified spellings in its publications: tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, program, catalog, prolog, decalog, demagog, and pedagog. A glance at the NEAs website suggests that theyve given up on all but two. In the 1940s the Bible and some classics were printed using a phonetic system of spelling invented in the 1830s by Isaac Pitman (the shorthand man). Traditional English spelling is like our relatives: to be complained about, but not easily dispensed with. This extract from an experiment by Noah Webster (quickly abandoned, by the way) illustrates how ugly and internally inconsistent a reformed system can be: There iz no alternativ. Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force; On the whole, English speakers remain indifferent to the efforts of spelling reformers, and that is a good thing for writers. Writers, of all people, need to appreciate and cherish the variety of English spelling. Take this example from Robert Sklars Movie-Made America: Once admitted to the intimacies of reel life, movie patrons wanted their fantasies continued unbroken into real life. Sklar could not have written that sentence with its play on reel and real if English had only one spelling for the long E sound. TIP: Traditional English spelling is a useful item in the writers toolbox. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Spelling category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:10 Grammar Mistakes You Should Avoid20 Pairs of One-Word and Two-Word Forms10 Tips to Improve Your Writing Skills