The New Literacy - Cora

Cora Howell
Reading Response 1
“The new literacy”

According to John Sutherland, an English professor from the University College of London, Facebook and texting is turning kids’ language into “bleak, bald and sad shorthand.” I can see why he would think so because there are lots of kids that seem to sum up their whole lives into two sentence posts on Facebook. It seems like doing so would cause kids to forget about being perfect on spelling and punctuation and get them to focus more on shorthand writing that is incorrect on many levels. But Andrea Lunsford, a writing professor from Stanford University, isn’t so sure about his idea. She put together a study called the “Stanford Study of Writing” and collected 14,672 student writing samples including in-class assignments, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts and chat sessions. She says “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” She believes that this sort of technology isn’t ruining our literacy, it is improving it dramatically. During her study, she found out that this new generation writes more than any other generation before them. That is because the biggest way kids socialize now is online on Facebook, or through texts to friends. Before the internet came along, people never wrote more than they had to during school. People virtually never picked up a pen or pencil to write unless they had to. Now a days, kids are posting their whole lives on sites like Facebook and Twitter, documenting their every move.
So where do I, Cora Howell, first year student at Whatcom Community College, stand on this issue? I honestly feel like it is helping my generation and generations after mine to, in fact, become more literate. To me, it seems like posting on Facebook daily and texting my boyfriend almost every minute that I am awake has helped me improve my spelling, punctuation and word choice. Although, I know that there might be a few exceptions to this. Some people abbreviate almost everything that they post and text to the point that you can barely understand what they are trying to say. So, maybe they are some of the people that don’t seem to be benefitting from the constant practice with writing. I always write out everything when I text and post to Facebook. Everything has to be perfect in spelling and punctuation before I send it because I feel like abbreviations make me look stupid and I don’t want to project that image to anyone. I think that if people make the choice to abbreviate everything, they are also making a choice to risk their knowledge of English and writing skills. In the long run though, I believe that this whole technological boost in writing is helping us become more literate as a whole.