Wired Magazine: Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

In the editorial featured on wired.com Clive Thompson writes an article titled “On the New Literacy”. Thompson presents the question on how with today’s new technology like emailing, blogging and facebook that it maybe negatively affecting the way students write today. They refer to this trend as “life writing”. Could the use of the short hand and slang words we use to communicate with an audience reflect on how we write for our academic papers today? John Sutherland of the University of London English believes that what we practice today as a tradition of writing has “dehydrated language into bleak, bold, sad shorthand style” and that this has effected how students write in class in a negative way while, Andrea Lunsford has challenged John Sutherland’s statement and has statistics showing that even though students short hand write on facebook etc, that it is not reflecting in their work in class and out of the 14,672 students writing samples she did not find one example of slang or text speak in an academic paper. It was discovered that young people today understand how to adapt their writing to different audiences. It has been found that we write more today than any other generation. Although Thompson does not come out and say so directly, he apparently presumes that technology would have a negative impact on the way students write today, but after looking through the figures on Andrea Lunsford students believes that our writing today could be improving as we do so much of it now.
In my opinion I do not think the technology advancements of today are hurting students at all, actually I agree with Lunsford and think it is helping us. It has been established that we write more today than in any other generation, so surely this has to help students improve their writing in class. It is usually the rule, the more you practice something the better you become. Most of us are aware of our audience and we adapt how we write to suit the recipient’s needs. We recognize the different styles needed in order to communicate with friends or our teacher, and adapt our writing to suit their needs. Personally when I write to a friend or post a blog, I use short, straight to the point sentences. I am not really concerned about grammar, spelling or really going into depth because I know that my friends will get the general point and will ask questions if they want to know more whereas with academic writing I pay particular attention to my spelling, sentence structure and how I can make it flow nicely. I want to make sure that my message is loud and clear. I am conscious of the fact that there is an obvious variation between writing to different audiences. It will always be vital to know how to write professionally that’s why classrooms are so important, but I feel with how our technology is today and all the different ways we write today that it will improve our writing and make it more enjoyable.