Clive Thompson Article

While reading the article "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy," it is easy to comprehend that Thompson is opposing the statement that University College of London English professor John Sutherland made about how kids these days can't write well and technology is to blame. He goes on to say that "Facebook, video (probably a youtube reference) and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays and texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (Clive). So basically what he is saying is that because of the greatest thing of mankind, kids that are growing up with these luxuries in this "tech age" are suffering with their ability to write well constructed, grammatically correct essays. As this article goes on, Thompson introduces Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She also opposes Sutherland's statements on modern day kids by talking about her project called the Stanford Study of Writing. It is essentially a collection of 14,672 student writing samples that include class assignments, formal essays and journal entries to emails, blog posts and chat sessions. She goes on to say that we are in a literacy revolution and that people in this generation write far more than any generation before us. Then she goes on to talk about how online writing (twitter, Facebook, windows messenger, etc.) has changed the way we write and think. Usually people from previous generations wouldn't write a single essay after school unless they worked in fields that required writing.

The team at Stanford University also found out that people of the modern age enjoy to write to audiences and not to just one person. They realized that when people were given school essays, they were less enthusiastic about writing because it was going to be read by one person (the professor). Thats why you see the popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc.. People write to audiences to let the word out; they want to express their feelings and have people write back and leave comments and support them; that's what's it's all about.

If you were to ask me my opinion of the subject, I would respond my telling you that I support the words of Thompson and Lunsford. They know exactly what going on in people's minds and they know how to expose it. If you go back to Sutherlands statement, there are some good points that he is making, not all of it bad. The part where he talks about how texting is a little dehydrated, can be a bit true. The majority of people that I know, do use the short cuts like ttyl, brb, atm, omg, etc.. To me, it seems a bit lazy, but it makes sense. When people use text, they are essentially texting one another and that involves close friends wanting to know what is going on. They don't have to worry about what's in the text because they know that they won't be graded. People know the difference between a school essay and just texting, that's why you will never see the ttyl's and the omg's in school writing. As for the statement of people writing for an audience, I support that all the way. I remember in the essay about how people write for that reason and it is very true. I look on the internet to find videogame walkthroughs and someone wrote that so people can see their work, and guess who just saw it? I think that is mission accomplished!