The New Literacy Summary

Clive Thompson, summary writer of "The New Literacy", presents to us how the generation prior to us feel like that the new generation is becoming illiturate due to our vast amount of technology in which we are able to socialize. Andrea Lunsford, a professor at Stanford University, conducted a rather large project called the Stanford Study of Writing in which was to study students behavior in writing samples. Lunsford collected 14,672 writing samples from the students and it included everything from in-class assignments and formal essays, to emails and blog posts. To Lunsford's surprise she found that students are more actively engaged to writing than previous years. According to Lunsford, "Technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions." This means that having access to internet or text messaging is not killing the way we write, it is simply expanding and making communication much simpler for anyone to use and apply. Lunsford also stated that "Before the internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment." I can agree with Lunsford because my parents never had the availability to use the technology we had today when they were in high school. They primarily used the typewriter, or they had to physically find a book on their topic that one of their teachers provided and they wrote down everything. no copiers, no printers, no internet. I'm very grateful for the technology we have available because I could get all of my homework done while at home and I don't have to travel as far to find all of the materials needed to complete an assignment. Lunsford found a very key detail as to how the students were able to write, the students tend to write about persuading, organizing, and debating. These are very important to readers because the students at Stanford are using different approaches on how to make their points across in their writing. I agree with this because I like presenting to an audience rather than a "one person" audience, I like having other people's opinions and feedback on my work rather than an instructor because it only has the opinion of that person. Your paper could be the best one out there and your instructor could have a bad judgement call and say that your paper is a flop. This discourages other writers from even presenting to a group or panel because of a poor judgement call may be in their hands. What stunned Lunsford the most was when she examined the work of the first year students and found that there were zero text speak language in any of the students submitted work. I believe this points a very positive answer to the question if students were illiturate due to the our technology accesses we have available. I say, don't judge a book by its cover.