Reading Response #1

Reading Response #1

It is often said that this generation is in danger of becoming stupid. With the modern technology of cell phones and the internet some people fear that text talk and social networking sites may in fact lead to illiteracy. In Clive Thompson’s article: “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” he dispels some of those fears using a project called: “The Stanford Study of Writing.” This project was organized by Andrea Lunsford a writing and rhetoric professor at Stanford University. She collected 14,672 student writing samples from assignments to their everyday writings. One of the most fascinating facts was that young people today write far more than the generations before them, and that 38 percent of the writing took place outside of the classroom. This of course is largely due to the explosion of the internet. Generations before had no need to write. You would leave school and unless your job involved writing you may never write another thing. Now in today’s world of the internet youth today are constantly writing from: emails, blogging, journal entries and lots of texting. Lunsford also found that students were adept at assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to get their point across. Thompson notes that when Lunsford examined the work of first year students, she didn’t find a single example of smiley face usage or text speak in an academic paper. He also likens the modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads to the Greek tradition of argument. Thompson apparently assumes that the internet is having a positive effect on writing and young people today.

My own view is that the internet has been life changing in everything we do especially writing. Now you can sit down type something out and post it on your social networking site of choice and it is instantly published. No longer must you submit and resubmit your written word to various publishers while waiting for someone to deem it worthy and make it available to the masses. Now days you can publish yourself with the just one click of a button. Though I concede that quality of writing sometimes leave much to be desired. I still maintain that just the possibilities of being able to write something that so many people can have access to amazes me. Plus as with anything, including writing practice makes perfect. Although some might object that some aspects of writing are falling to the wayside such as spelling, (With the modern convenience of spell check) or control and censorship so that not just anything can be published. I reply to that: good! It’s about time that the public was truly granted freedom of speech. Why shouldn’t we be able to write what we want whenever we’d like. It’s high time that writing was made to be something fun and taken out of the classroom. I love that this generation is doing more writing than all the previous generations. I love this blogging concept of writing to an audience of potentially many and not just one teacher who only cares about punctuation and spelling. This to me is everything good writing should be. Freedom of what you want to write about. The ability to self-publish at the drop of a hat and a convenient way for people to gain access to it. This issue is important, because it shows the doubter’s that we are not becoming an illiterate society. If anything society today is more literate and continuing to blossom in the world of modern technologies.