Standing Ovation: Reading Response 1

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Reading Response 1

In Clive Thompson’s article “The New Literacy,” he says generation X has lost the ability to articulate their thoughts through writing compared to previous generations. For example, Thompson suggests Facebook is stupid because why would someone like to know you are going to the bathroom at this particular point in time, or just turned off the light and are now headed to the living room to watch T.V.? Information collected by Andrea Lunsford from Stanford University strongly suggests quite the opposite; she thinks it is helping the generation by encouraging people to become more literate and social. From 2001-2006 Lunsford collected 14,672 writing samples from different media communications that suggests technology isn’t hurting our ability to be intelligent writers, it is actually making us more diverse writers.

Many people today write more than the letter writers of yester years ( think snail mail). One may ask, does quantity lead to quality? The many different communication medias today are Facebook, chat rooms, Twitter, emails, blogs, class room essays, and web cams.
These different communication medias today encourage social literacy and these many social sites are leading to better writers because you have more experience with writing in many different formats.

My own view is that the media communications today are not making people illiterate.
I just have recently wrote more that 3 years ago because of school. In the job of Janitor, there was not much writing. The communications we would use would be limited to texting or cell phone to turn in a supply list. Because of school I have learned to write essays, communicate by email, blogs and talk to teachers through Moodle. Though I concede that texting uses abbreviations and encourages broken sentences, I still maintain that texting and other media communications still make you write more than you would otherwise. Some people might think that these forms of communication wouldn’t make one a better writer, but I think that you are practicing better writing skills.

In conclusion this issue is important. The generation of yesterday only wrote for school work. And they did not know anything about what was happening in the world. Now with all the media communications today, you can find out about almost anything and everything. With today’s technology people are practicing more literacy. Practice makes perfect and the more you write the better you become.

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Welcome

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. I hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it!