Clive Thompson article

In Clive Thompson’s article “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” people such as John Sutherland, a professor in London, say that technology is causing students today to not be able to write. Social networks such as Facebook or people texting have caused English grammar is to be to be “dehydrated” or misused in the way that most words are abbreviated, shorthand, slang, and replaced with numbers and symbols. This has caused the students to become lazy with their writing. Technology is killing the well-crafted, truthful academic writings that are grammatically correct. In his exact words Sutherland says “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” From this we can assume he is talking about the students writing today.
Others such as Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University and Clive Thompson disagree. Such people say that technology is evolving writing and bringing a difference to how the writing is performed and what the writing is about. Lunsford claims “…we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution…”(1) With this being said she means that technology is pushing beyond our boundaries in writing in new directions, new positive directions.
Lunsford has collected students writing from a range of academic writings to social network writings to blog posts to emails to chat sessions. She has found that students today write more than they ever have in the past. Before the internet most people never continued to write after they left school unless their job required them to do so. Now most socializing is done online between Facebook and email. When in a class there is only one audience to write for and that is their professors. Students now write for anyone from teachers to parents to friends. That the technology way of writing has helped the students change their tone of writing based on who they are writing to and the best way to get that other person to understand as what Clive claims when he says, “students were remarkably adept at…assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” (2)
I personally agree with that of Clive Thompson and Andrea Lunsford. Technology has made it so that more people are continuing to write in and out of school. Students write what they find important to them which make it have more of a valuable meaning to society. The writing lets the students express themselves in different ways and have social expressions and interactions with each other. Writing today has made students more social over the internet causing the students to learn how to tone their writing for different types of audiences. The problem isn’t that people don’t know how to write academic papers but they choose not to. They may find writing academically to be boring, long, and repetitive whereas writing socially you are quick and to the point and have more of an audience. Also it the technology way of writing has caused people to think in a more creative way in how they can shorten things; what words or letters are left out and what numbers or symbols take place of the words or letters.
Juliana Salmonson