CLIVE

Blogging, Facebook and text messaging are commonly thought to hold back and stifle students writing ability, Clive Thomson disagrees. Thomson writes in his essay, titled "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy", that these technologies have not regressed students ability to formerly write, but in fact, has progressed their writing ability immensely. Thompson sites a study done by Andrea Lunsford to show that the student literacy is on the rise. The study Lunsford organized took place from 2001 to 2006, in which she collected over 14000 formal student essays, blog posts, emails, journal entries, and in class assignments. Lunsford was astonished by the results, saying “I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," implying that all of this out-of-class writing that is taking place is actually helping students progress their writing, letting them find out with hands on experience which writing style is most effective on the audience they are trying to reach. These results are contrary to the popular belief that new age students are being held back by their habits of constant communication, whether it be through twitter, Facebook, or texting.
Thompson reminds the reader that until recently people would learn to write and structure paragraphs, but would never actually use their ability to write properly in everyday situations, lest their profession required it. This was true until recently, cellphones and Facebook have cause a written literature explosion, people now can communicate at will, at any time, day or night. Thompson portrays this as good writing practice, saying “But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes” Implying that he agrees with Lunsford’s survey results. I agree with Thompson, peoples writings skills were bound to improve with more practice, maybe not as much as expected though, but the results should not be too much of a surprise.
Thompson, though, is quick not to give all the credit for this literacy revolution to the students use of technologies, he states “Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose”. What Thompson means by this, is that no matter how much we may learn on our own from our own technological advances, we will always need good teachers to provide a solid literacy structure, so that we may use these technologies properly, and learn from them more efficiently. Thompson ends his essay with one final piece of insight, saying “We think of writing as either good or bad. 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”. Thompson is dead on saying this, he implies that we, as a culture, think too black and white, only seeing one right way to do things, when, in fact, there can be more than one proper way to accomplish something, as Lunsford’s study shows. Thompson also implies, with this statement, that knowing who you are writing for, and why you are writing, may actually be more important than sentence structure, or grammar, I find this to be partially right, it is extremely important to know who you are writing for, and why, but proper grammar, spelling, and sentence structure is a must.