Clive Thomson on the New Literacy

In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggests that technology has caused us to write far more than any other generation has. Why we write more is because of all the social networks we are able to use today. such as; Facebook, Twitter, texting, e-mailing, and many more. Thompson claims that, "before the internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment." In his essay Thompson talks about Andrea Lunsford, who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University and her work on organizing a project called Stanford Study of Writing. She collected 14, 672 samples of student writings. Thompson quotes Lunsford saying ,"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." Lunsford doesn't think that technology is decreasing our ability to write, but instead is making it better because our generation writes more than any other has. Lundford and her team found that students were skilled in what they call kairos, that Thompson explained as, "assessing their audience and adaptong their tone and technique to best get their point across." Basically it means that if the students put their own opinions in and say what they need to say to get their point across, they should be able to do so. When in class the Stanford students were, most of the time, less excited to write their in class projects. the reason for that being because the only audience they were writing for was their teacher, and it didn't serve any purpose but a grade.
I agree with almost everything that Thompson and lunsford suggest. As a student, i know that i probably wouldn't write as much, if i didn't have e-mail, facebook, texting and the internet for that matter. With using all those things i have learned how to type a lot faster, and learned to spell better. I feel as if all the technology can help studentd advance in their writing, although it does have some down sides. some of those are the fact that when you text and chat people tend to abbreviate words and dont write out the whole word. Many people also don't spell the simplest words right, or they change a letter of the word to make it "cooler". my point to this is that by doing all those abbreviations, you may accidentally do that when writing an essay, or any paper for class. As long as students are taught the proper grammar and technique with writing, then all the technology these days can be a good thing. we just need to use it to our benefit, and teach eachother how to use it the proper way. as Thompson says, "good teaching is alwasy going to be crucial, as is the matering of formal academic prose." This is very true, as long as we have good teaching in the school systems then we should be able to increase our ability to write to better, and be able to spell words correctly.