Whose idea was it to write term papers?
Before there was a drawstring backpack and multi colored gel pens, school was less of a social scene and more of a part of essential life like tending to crops or feeding the livestock. Having children go away to an organized school building is something that has been happening since the ancient Greeks. Early American history, however, had many children who could not go away to a school house during the day. This was often because they lived in a remote area that was not near a town. Another reason that kept kids from going to school was their responsibilities on their family farm. It took a lot of people and hard work to maintain a farm and often children were invaluable laborers. Farms were crucial to the early settlers because everyone had to grow their own food. Nowadays, we rely on a few farmers to maintain their farm as a business to grow enough food for all of us to go shopping for at the grocery store. Back then, there were less people and they were spread farther apart. You had to grow food for your own family and the town you were in just to survive. Even if another farmer had a surplus of food, there was no way you could know that if you were not nearby. There was a lack of communication devices like phones, internet, or television and no one was advertising what they may have to share or sell.
When those children were able to go to school, they may have utilized a drawstring backpack but gel pens were long from being invented. The Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire, had an established school system from at least the year 425 A.D. Their governmental system for education was put into place because of a need for educated people to be knowledgeable about weapons and military strategy. They needed these children to grow up learning these skills and be able to join their military when they were old enough. In the Islamic culture, there was also a school system established. Their schools were mainly focused on religious education. In the United States, the term school can include pre-school and kindergarten, as well as elementary school or grade school and secondary schools like high school or senior high school. These schools are all monitored by the Department of Education for each individual state.
Getting schools put into place were necessary for communities to have educated people to do jobs and to run the country. That is still the main reason for education but with children being forced to go to school instead of viewing it as a privilege, the kids are having a different attitude towards the whole experience. Some kids choose a drawstring backpack with extreme caution, terrified of not fitting in. Other kids doodle at their desk with sparkly gel pens and would rather be at home.
“Hey, I like your pen!”
School supplies are a large part of school children’s lives, with friendships being made over similar race car shaped erasers and a fascinating parker pen. While older children may be concerned with laptops and flash drives, younger school age children want to have the best pencil toppers and the coolest color ballpoint pen. Sometimes they just really enjoy being able to show off these items to a classmate. Other times, children engage in trading a blue ballpoint pen for a purple ball point pen. Because school supplies can become a part of the social status differentiators among school children, it is a good idea for teachers and school officials to provide basic supplies to all children like pencils and paper. Although you can’t avoid the inevitable parker pen that one kid will bring to school that makes him stand out against all the other kids who do not have their own parker pen, but instead a school issue number 2 pencil.
With so many various school supplies out there it is hard for kids not to find something new and exciting every year. This is alright as long as these items are making them excited for learning and not being a distraction to themselves and their classmates. For example, almost every college student owns a laptop. They can leave their laptops at home or in their on or off campus housing facility but they also have the option to bring their laptops to class with them. This is a practical option for many students. A lot of students commute to class and spend hours on campus with down time in which they could be doing homework on their laptop. An advantage of having their laptop with them is that they have all of their work with them all of the time. This is good if they have time to work on something for another class, but bad if they are working on an assignment for another class during a class. Having their laptop is good if they forget to bring an assignment and can just show it to their teacher on their laptop or print it out at school from their laptop, but it is bad if they are using their laptop to finish the assignment in class. It is good that colleges usually offer wireless internet for students who have laptops but during class students could be using their laptop to get online and spend time on Facebook instead of listening in class. A laptop sounds like a big difference from other school supplies like pens, but you’d be surprised how young children can entertain themselves with just about anything.
It’s that time of the year again!
School takes up most of the time of a kid’s life. They spend about seven hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months of the year in a classroom. We all know that summer vacation is a huge event for school age kids and college kids. It is a much anticipated break that adults do not get the luxury of having in their career unless they have a job in which they work for a school. No amount of custom pencils can compare to the exhilarating feeling of knowing that you are free from school. For three months that is.
Then it is time to go back. Back to school has become such a large commercial event with so much advertising and so many promotions that you would think that back to school is a holiday occasion. Custom notebooks, custom pencils, and markers in every color imaginable are screaming at you in each and every store you walk into. Plus you are getting bombarded with retail circulars that are advertising all of these great back to school specials. All of the end caps in every store are trying to tie their products into the back to school event. Buy shampoo so your head looks its best on the first day of school! Buy Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats to send your kids off to school full and focused! Custom pencils are now better than regular pencils and graphing calculators have replaced regular calculators as a much needed item for that big day.
Unlike Christmas, the more that back to school is advertised, the worse it makes kids feel. Parents, on the other hand, may be dreaming of the day when they get to hand their kids off to their teacher and have them occupied and out of the house for the whole week. But kids are not too excited to end their days of sleeping in late and hanging out at the pool all day. So let’s make it easier on them and make sure they have everything that they need for a good start to the school year; especially the most important things like papers and pens.
Why is there all of this written homework?
Writing is very important in the process of a child’s learning. Writing strengthens proper verbal communication but it is also its own important form of communication. Especially in today’s world, being able to write effectively is crucial for everything from sending emails to signing papers. Children start learning to read and write at a young age by being taught their letters of the alphabet and each sound that the letters make to form words. The letters of the alphabet become like an imprint in your mind that eventually leads to memorization recognition and the ability to read words.
The difference between writing and speaking is the amount of time that you get to process your thoughts before putting them down on paper. Have you ever wished that you could take back something stupid that tumbled out of your mouth a little too quickly? Writing gives you that option because you can just erase the regretted words and they are gone forever. Talking requires apologies and public corrections to make something right again.
Sometimes it takes nothing more than personalized custom pens to get children writing. Other times it is a bit more of a struggle. Through talking we can pick up bad grammatical habits and slang words that are heard and repeated all the time. In writing, we are taught the correct way to speak and that is something that children are often not familiar with because of all the outside influences of improper English; whether that is by television characters or song lyrics. Song lyrics and catchy movie lines especially are dangerous because of the imprint they can leave on a child’s memory and the desire the child then has to repeat these lines over and over again. If you say something enough it becomes a part of your regular habits and works directly against the efforts of schools that teach you how to speak and write in a grammatically correct manner.
Writing is so very important not just for learning how to write and speak correctly but also for problem solving. Even for a subject like math, writing out your thoughts and strategies for solving a problem can be helpful in coming to a conclusion for an answer. Personalized custom pens with math equations on them can help to keep kids motivated and reminded of what they are learning. Personalized custom pens can even be made with an imprint of each child’s name so that they feel that they have their own special tool for writing.
When did we start using pens?
Writing has been a part of our culture from the beginning of time. Without writing, we would not know anything about the people who came before us. From cave drawings to journal entries to public records to gravestones, writing has been our peek into the voice of history. The very first pen was in the form of a well sharpened stone. People would use the sharpened stone to write messages on stone walls or caves. These were in a pictorial form but all the same, these drawings were those people’s way of communicating to each other. Egyptian hieroglyphics are another example of a form of pictures or symbols that were used as words to form messages.
After writing on a wall, there was the use of a piece of stone in the form of a tablet that was scratched into with a sharpened stone pen. This is just like our modern day pen and paper except with no eraser. This form of writing was great compared to writing on walls because the tablets were portable. In the beginning of writing history, writing utensils were not developed enough for people to be able to write detailed images. Therefore, pictures were simple and the more demand there was for written communication the simpler the pictures became. These simple pictures soon became universal symbols for letters or words. Eventually these symbols developed into letters of the alphabet. The writing utensils were still too primitive for small, detailed letters so the first alphabet letters were all in upper case.
The Greeks were the first to implement a writing utensil similar to the pens that we have today. They used a writing stylus that they created out of metal, bone, or ivory. The writing stylus would make marks on a tablet that was coated in wax. Two wax coated tablets were attached together with a hinge so that you could close the book when you were done writing which would protect your words. The Chinese then invented “Indian ink” which let us use ink for writing on things instead of scratching words into a tablet. This then lead to the quill pen dipped in ink that the American settlers used to write.
Hundreds of years later, we borrow, lose, and buy pens like it’s no big deal. We give hundreds of pens out as a promotional gift or order nicer looking pens for a business gift to our employees. Pens are no longer handmade and rare so we can get 1000 promotional gift pens cheaply. This is great because everyone needs pens so that promotional gift will definitely be used by someone. Likewise, employees will use pens as business gifts so you don’t have to have the uncertainty of whether they will like it as you could with less useful business gifts.
Why write with pens when we could just talk with our mouths?
Long before we were handing out promo pens as a marketing tool, oral communication was the most effective way that messages got delivered. Other systems like the ringing of a bell or the beating of a drum were ways to alert those out of walking distance but mainly, verbal communication was how things got said. The only problem was that not everyone spoke the same language. Language problems caused a great barrier among people from different areas and backgrounds and contributed to a lot of physical attack for lack of any other way to express what is “mine.”
Cave drawings began the first type of written communication. This was important because it was a permanent record of a story that was trying to be told. Spoken information could very easily get misunderstood, distorted or forgotten. Drawings, however, were still not perfect because they could get misinterpreted.
A need for written documents arose as people began to settle onto properties as farmers instead of being mainly roaming hunters. With agricultural plots there was a need for a distinction of property lines. This led to the development of symbols so that there could be an accurate record of personal property in the community. Eventually when symbols became letters and letters became words, we were able to write binding contracts and records.
Being able to keep the message in its original form is why we need writing and not just speaking. You can explain this to your students or employees when they are getting tired of having to write document after document in what they may feel is a waste of their time. You could have a meeting or lesson about the importance of communication and hand out promotional items like pens, pencils, and markers. Giving out promo pens not only gives the people the a promo item as a gift, but also serves as a reminder of the message of the meeting each time they use the promotional items. Just the sheer amount of use that the promo items will get will illustrate your point of the importance of writing.
So how do you use those pens to write your message?
Personalized pens make great advertising products. Having a successful marketing campaign means building up a recognizable brand image in the eyes of the consumer. Promotional products are a key tool in the branding process because promotional products are a physical piece of the company brand that you can have to take home with you and be able to look at again and again. Promotional products, such as tote bags, water bottles, or promo pens differ from an advertisement because advertisements rely on you driving past that highway billboard or sitting through that television or radio commercial or clicking on that banner ad on the internet for you to even be exposed to the message. Advertising products like personalized pens are there for the consumer to look at every day and for them to use repeatedly.
Personalized pens are especially effective if you are marketing a consumer product or customer service that involves writing or words in some way, like books or magazines. Your target audience can be thinking about your writing product while they are writing with your personalized pen. Do not worry if your product has nothing to do with writing. Pens are still very effective advertising products because everyone needs to use them. In addition, you will be getting repeated exposure and recognition of your company’s name. Then when the consumer requires your particular product or service in their life, they will think of your company first because they saw your name on their pen while they were writing with it every day.
Ordering your own personalized pens is easy. A promotional company can walk you through the simple steps involved in getting your own advertising tools. The first step is seeing what the promotional company has to offer. There can be more choices than you would ever imagine for a pen. Depending on the occasion in which you are using the pens, you can look for the most cost efficient pens or you can look for the nicest looking pens. There are even pens that write in all sorts of different colors.
With that many options it is hard to know what to choose and where to even start your search. Choose a priority for your personalized pen purchase. Maybe your priority is price so sort the searches by price to make sure you are within your budget. Maybe your priority is color. Find out which pens come in your company color.
Once you’ve chosen a pen you can send the promotional company your logo, company name, and/or desired text. An artist will then format the look of your pen before sending your final order to the printer. You will receive the pens in the mail and be able to start marketing your company in no time.