Clive Thompson...

In the article "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy" Clive Thompson introduces the idea that current technology is improving the writing of students in this day and age. To start off this article, Clive mentions John Sutherland, a College of London English professor. Sutherland states that, due to technology the students way of writing has become "bleak, bald, sad shorthand." Thompson then disagreed with this statement and took Stanford University's professor of Writing and Rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford into further consideration.

Andrea Lunsford has created a program where she collects writing pieces to scrutinize college students' prose. Over the course of five years (2001-2006) Lunsford collected 14, 672 writings from students and drew some interesting conclusions. Based off her results, Lunsford concluded that young people today write a lot more than any other previous generations. She believes this may be from all the social networking that takes place now days. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Texting...Etc. These factors make complete sense in which such applications are being used constantly by people, making it almost habitual to write and extend your thoughts. Lunsford also discovered that this prose is very good. She states that students are great 'kairos'. Kairos are people whom succeed in grasping their audience and getting the point across.

Coming from my personal point of view, I think that new aged technology is in fact pushing literacy in “cool directions”. The idea of social networking effecting literacy negatively is ridiculous from my point of view. I feel it is great that people every single day are practicing writing whether it is texting someone or writing on some other social network. Like said before, if it weren’t for social networking- people would never sit down and write, unless they were in classroom setting and told to. The advancements in technology definitely play a role and make a difference in writing as well. To explain, just a few years ago ‘QWERTY’ keyboards, T9 texting and auto correct were unheard of. Forcing people to use acronyms and shortened words such as, BRB, LOL, K, or U. Now that the things listed above are incorporated in cell phones and computers, and writing is on a whole different level than what it was just a few years back. Obviously people are still using these terms, just not as commonly or not for academic purposes. Thompson states, "of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose." This is very true. You can’t depend on technology to make us all into kairos, and correct our mistakes for us. This is why teachers and professors are there to guide us and teach us what we need to know about literacy. Also why, we are taught multiple ways to write, for different purposes and for different audiences. Proper education is very important in everyday life to help us succeed academically. Together, with the instruction of teachers and professors, and the practicing on social networks, us as a whole WILL succeed in literacy and prove that texting and networking are positive influences on literacy today.