Clive Thompson on the New Literacy Summary

In Clive Thompsons article, "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy" he explains how " kids today can't write-and technology is to blame." He states that, "Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand (par 1)." He references an English professor named John Sutherland from the University College of London who believes that, "An age of illiteracy is at hand." Another professor believes very differently on the subject of children's writing habits. Andrea Lunsford who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, composed and organized a project called the Stanford Study of Writing. The project was constucted over a process of five year between the years 2001 through 2006. During these years she was able to collect 14,672 students writing samples; in-class assignments, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. After her project she came up with her conclusions stating, " I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." She says, " technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it-and pushing our literacy in bold new directions (par 1)." All the writing that Lunsford collected from the students at Stanford, 38 percent of it were taken outside of the classroom from online writing like facebook and emails, also a lot of the writing were in text messaging, its called "life writing." Kids today write so much more than fifty years ago because of the internet and all the new technology that has expanded the way we write. Most student write because they have an audience in facebook, myspace, twitter and other related chating cites along with texting they are talking to their friends and family to make it easier and more fun for them to write. Instead of writing in class essays where they don't have an audience and it's difficult for them to discuss their thoughts in writing. Even though messaging and texting is basic and bland writing that most poeple think it is worstening our childrens writing, it is actually getting our students to write more and expand our knowledge. Clive Thompson also tells us that good teaching is very effective and crucial to the way children learn. If teachers keep teaching writing in the proper tense they know how to write well and also learn the new ways of writing with our developing technologies.