Summary: Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggests that "Kids today can't write" and the technology is to blame. This is one of Thompson’s only quotes that he states in his essay. What I got out of Thompsons quote was that he believes that too is against technology. John Sutherland the professor from the University College of London blames “Facebook for encouraging narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald and sad shorthand". I believe that Sutherland’s point of view is that he is against technology. Clive Thompson uses two references John Sutherland and Andrea Lunsford. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Lunsford conducted a study on writing called Stanford Study of Writing; this was used to scrutinize college student’s composition. From 2001 to 2006 Lunsford had collected 14,672 students writing samples. The writing samples consisted of in-class assignments, formal essays and anything from journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Lunsford found that young people today write far more than any other generation before them. Before internet most Americans never wrote anything, unless it was a school assignment. For the students writing is all about persuading and organizing and debating. As I grew up I remembered learning about two different writing, persuasive and expository writing. My favorite was the persuasive essays, because I loved persuading people to do what I wanted them to do, that and I was told that I was good at it. In English 100 we were given an assignment to write in three different ways. The first was our formal writing; the second was an email that we had to write to a friend, this email was an informal writing. The third type of writing was a text message to a person that you text the most, this writing was also informal. What I noticed about the way we write in these various forms was that, when the writing is formal we take more time to write everything and we write it with care. When it comes to texting and emails we don’t take the time to carefully look over what we wrote, we just simply write it and send it even if every word we write is some type of IM text or slang, such a lol or brb. My own view is that kids can write they just write in many different forms, and maybe some of the forms have rubbed off on them but at least we still write. At the end of Thompsons essay he writes “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”. I read that and thought about, what Thompson might mean by that, and I came up with different answers but the one that really stuck was that he’s not against technology; he just thinks that it does over power our writing and we need to tone it down just a bit.