Blog post on Clive Thompson

In his recent work, Clive Thompson on the New Literacy, Thompson suggests that all of the speculation that people have about the internets negative effects on the youth's writing skills are wrong. He states that a study was conducted that involved collecting 14,672 writing samples from students and analyzing them. There was no text spelling or other misspellings of that kind. In fact, Thompson thinks that the internet has made the youth even better writers than the generation 50 years ago. He thinks that since the youth is so involved with writing towards an audience that they are now experienced at analyzing their audience and changing their writing to fit those audience's standards. Which is what the Greeks did so long ago but we have just pulled away from that until recently. Thompson continues to say that the youth is far more literate than 50 years ago when the only writing people did was required writing. The meaning of writing has changed too, from only writing because you were told to, to writing to persuade someone or to debate something. Thonpson also says that students want an audience for their writing and when they write essays for class, the only audience they have is the professor. Although Thompson doesn’t say directly in his writing, he apperently assumes that things like Facebook, Twitter and others of the sort are actually good for your writing skill.

My view on the internets effect on writing is that it creates more seasoned writers and debaters as well. For example, if you go on youtube and look at the comments, you are bound to see at least on debate going on. Usually these debates are young people trying to convince others that their way is better than the opposition. They debate because that topic is important to them. Even though I know that it probably isn’t as good practice as writing a letter or a story, I still know that it’s better than nothing because I doubt that youth will write a story often enough to keep up with how often they text. For example, I text about 500 words a day and I write 0 that isn’t required of me. Although some might object that texting will damage the youths grammer, I reply that it won’t affect it at all because they know that when they text words like ppl for people, ttyl for talk to you later or u for you, it is just a shortcut when they write a professional paper, they won’t use those shortcuts because it is not professional. This issue is important because it shows people (especially the pre-internet generations) that the internet is not something that will destroy your kids. If used correctly, it will help your kids become more adept to this time we live in now. I believe that it will promote the use of words to get people on your side instead of fists and threats. If people realize that the internet isn’t some scary place, then maybe it won’t have such a bad reputation.