New Literacy

Clive Thompson's article, "on the New Literacy", was mainly about how technology has impacted academic writing. We have heard for years that due to email and texting our writing has turned into hacked up sentences full of acronyms and abbreviasions. Some disagree. Has technology helped our academic writing, or has it hurt our grammar? Thompson introduces Andrea Lundsford who is a writing professor from Stanford University. She conducted a stude of the years 2001-2006. She gatheres 14,672 writing samples and tested them to see if our writing skills did decrease. Ultimately she found out that our writing skills haven't gotten worse, they in fact have improved. Lunsford came to the conclusion that it's because we socialize so much more through text. We are constanly practicing our writing. It is known that our generation today writes more than any other generation before us. We are always logged on to our web pages gossiping to our friends, filling our survey afer survey, and our generation sends text messages all day long. This in time adds up to a lot of text we don't realize we write or practice. Without the internet or cell phones what writing does take place today? Our generation doesn't hand write anything these days. Is this bad? Thompson goes on to point our the reason why it hasn't affected our writing is because students now days are writing for an audience; whether it be our professor for our homework, or saying something sly about your friends new Facebook pictures. We keep in mind who will read our work. It's something we have adapted to as students. While Lunsford was researching her work, she looked over academic papers looking for examples of short hand in academic writing due to texting, but she didnt find any. It looks like our generation is very aware of what kind of audience we need to write to and how to come across academic when needed. This came as a surprise to me. i was sure that short hand would be more apparent in our writing because of texting, but in the end it didn't. Lunsford goes on to state, "I think we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," what she is saying here is that our writing is evolving. Continuosly getting better in short periods of time, something that we have seen since Greek civilization. I have to agree with Lunsford. Technology isn't hurting our writing, its helping. It allows us to practice our skills everyday rather than when your sitting in a classroom learning about it.