Clive Thompson's article summary

They say technology ruins our generation and the way we think and write but is that really true? Is technology really collapsing our writing ways or is it actually doing the opposite? Clive Thompson’s article does a really good job at proving what so many people think about technology is not very true. People would think students typically write more in school just for simple school assignments. Sure, they learn to write formal and proper but most of the time they aren’t really interested in that time of writing. According to a study done at Stanford by Andrea Lunsford, 38 percent of the students write outside of class. Although that may not seem like a lot, it does tell that a little over one third of that school’s population writes outside of class because they want to, not because they are told to. As stated by Andrea Lunsford, “we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization”. I strongly agree because I believe that the ancient Greek civilization worked a lot like the chat rooms we have online today. It is a public place where people are able to speak out their opinions and get an instant reply. By doing the study, Lunsford learned that people actually write more today than the past generations. The only time people would write was when they were told to at school or if they had a job that needed a writing skill. Today, most writers would rather write to an audience than to simply write for no purpose other than to get a grade for class. You would think that people would have written more in the past few generations because it was difficult to keep in touch with family or friends far from home so letters would probably have been more popular. I guess that wasn’t the case. Id imagine letters weren’t as popular because people were a lot busier back then or may not have been well enough off to write letters all the time. In my opinion, technology is actually helping everyone write more and stay connected to those far away from home. Cell phones are a necessity for pretty much everyone. Facebook has become one of the most popular websites worldwide. By Thompson starting this article by referring to “pundits fretting once again about how kids today can‘t write”, Thompson apparently assumes that this whole “technology is bad for writing” debate is just a joke. When it comes to the topic of online chat, I think it’s the easiest, most popular form of writing teenagers use today. Not to mention texting. I could honestly say a very high number of texts are sent and received from students throughout the day. Texting does not get in the way of formal writing. It was proved by the study conducted by Lunsford. In fact, not one single example of texting speak was shown in an academic paper. Just because we like to abbreviate things on text because its faster, does not mean we will forget the years of training we’ve had in our past English classes to write a formal paper. As a matter of fact, we have lots of tools thanks to the internet to use to help us improve our writing. In the end, I stand strong in my believe that technology is in fact helping all of us improve and in fact persuade us to write more often. They do say practice makes perfect.