Reading Response 1- The New Literacy

In Clive Thompsons “The New Literacy” Thompson argues that technology is not hurting literacy in today’s generation. Throughout the article he proves that technology is expanding and changing writing for the better. Thompson starts it out by stating John Sutherland’s point of view that technology has turned writing into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” Sutherland is a professor for University College of London, and Thompson makes it no secret that he disagrees with him. He also uses Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, to prove his beliefs. Lunsford organized a project called Stanford Study of Writing in which she collected assignments, essays, journals, emails, and chat sessions from students to better analyze their writing. Through her work Lunsford found that because of online socialization, “young people today write far more than any generation before them.” She found that 38 percent of the writing Stanford students do is outside of school, ‘Life writing’. Thompson goes on the talk about how before the internet, writing wasn’t an everyday thing, most Americans only wrote for school or work assignments. Lunsford also found that students are remarkably good at writing for an audience; they can adjust their tone to that audience and find the best way to get their point across. Modern online writing is then compared to that of the Greek literary traditions of argument, rather than the letter and essay writing of our past. Through her research, Lunsford discovered that students are far less enthusiastic about having to write in-class assignments that have only the instructor as the audience, and when she studied freshman work, she found no evidence of what Sutherland called “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” Although Thompson does not say so directly, he seems to assume that technology has increased young people’s ability to demonstrate acceptable pieces of writing. He also proves that because students are accustomed to writing for an audience, it gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. Personally, I believe that technology has helped expand writing. Even if kids are only writing on Facebook or through texting, they are still using words and thinking about what they are saying. Through internet writing, kids have learned to express emotion and use tone with their words so that their words can be understood how they want them to be. The internet also connects us to people all over the world, making us more social and I think it helps us to be more in touch with ourselves because we are able to write down our emotions and tell them to other people. This issue is important because writing and literacy is an important part of how we function and communicate as a society. Though grammar and spelling might have been harmed by texting speech, it just gives the teachers all the more incentive to teach us at younger ages how to properly use these things. With good teaching, along with an acceptance of the direction technology is leading literacy, writing quality should be able to continue to get better from here on out.