Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

In his recent work, “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson suggests that technology is making us illiterate. Thompson claims that “kids today can’t write- and technology is to blame.” Although Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that texting and email are the reasons why kids and students are losing our “old school” sense of writing. I believe that this is not true! We are now in the technology age. Even though we use “Bleak, bald, shorthand” (John Sutherland, page 1) writing, I believe that our generation still has the skills to write a traditional essay. We have grown up learning the techniques that are required to write an essay, but we have also learned a new way of communication through texting or email. We many abbreviate certain words, or use numbers for words, but we can always go back to our old way of writing. I believe this because of my past experiences. I have been texting my friends and family for almost 3 years. I have always written things “shorthand” through texting. I misspell things and sometimes just don’t make sense because I shorten everything so much. This is where everyone starts to freak out because they think if we use one way of writing we will lose our old way.

Thompson then brings a second view into his essay. Andrea Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Lunsford had conducted a project called the Stanford Study of Writing. It was a project to scrutinize college students written language. Over 5 years she had collected 14,672 samples of student writing. These samples were anything from “in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.” She goes on to state, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” This is a big statement, but in my opinion, I believe she is correct. We are able to text and email very quickly, and get our main points across to the other person. It is the convenience of the quickness that makes it so useful for our quick paced life. Lunsford’s project also gave her some other very interesting facts. Her team found that “students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call karios- assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” This was one of the main points in this essay for me personally. After reading this I realized that even though most of us don’t realize our writing techniques, we do have different tones and way of writing to get our point better across to different people. When we know who we are writing for, and how we can write “for” them, we get a better idea of how we need to word things. In the last sentence of this essay Lunsford claims “What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.” My own view is that this is the most important part of writing! If I know who my essay is going to and how to get my point across, I will write a certain way. After reading this essay I agree with Lunsford. Texting, email, and instant messaging are giving us a better sense of how to write to a certain audience, which will benefit us when we need to write a persuasive essay.