response to Clive Thompson

In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggest that maybe technology is reviving our literary writing. Thompson claims that young kids in this generation write far more than any other generation due to the technologies we have. Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, it seems that he feels strongly that technology is help our literary techniques go through a revolution, which we haven’t seen since the Greek civilization. He starts his writing out by quoting John Sutherland, an English professor at the University College of London, in stating that “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand”. Later he goes on to arguing that point with Andrea Lunsford’s, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, studies. She collected 14,672 student writing samples- everything from in-class assignments, to formal essays, and even journal entries. One of the first things she found is that young people today write far more than any other generation before due to online chatting. Of all the writing Stanford students did almost 40 percent of it was outside the classroom. Lunsford has stated that “before internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless these people had jobs that required you to do so. Lunsford feels strongly that a persons audience affects how they write and it seems that Thompson is behind this 100 percent. In class essays, according to Lunsford serve no purpose except to get a good grade for the student. Which is saying that the audience the writer has affects how you would write.
My own view is that I have been writing a lot since I have the internet right in front of me. Though i concede that I may not always use the proper grammar and spelling that i would use on an essay for class i still maintain that it is helping our literary writing. for example i have gotten better at using a keyboard to type, I am a lot faster at what i use to be. Although some people might object and say that it doesn’t help with structure of a formal class essay, I reply that kids have been taught how to do so and know that when they need to use a proper structure, they will do so. I am one of those kids that does that. I am really bad at abbreviating my word in text or online but I know what i should be doing in my class assignments. This issue is very important because it catches peoples attention of how they may write and bring it into their own questioning. It is getting students to realize that we need to have proper structure and grammar and that we can’t use our slang terms in our assignments. As long as kids save their “text talk” for when they are actually texting a friend they should do fine on assignments when they know how to write. I believe that discussions like this one should be brought up to students in middle schools or elementary because kids now-a-days are receiving cell phones earlier and earlier and as long as they are taught the proper structure and technique this shouldn’t be a problem.

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