Illiterate or not? (Clive Thompson Summary)

In the Clive Thompson’s article, “The New Literacy,” he is discussing an argument of whether kids these days are revolutionizing writing, or if they aren’t, and in fact they are illiterate. He gives the opinion of an English professor from The University College of London, John Sutherland, who states that he believes that “kids today can’t write, and technology is to blame.” Furthermore, he believes that websites like Facebook, and activities like texting and PowerPoint have replaced the meaningful essays kids in the past wrote. Due to these things Sutherland says writing has become “bleak, bald, sad, and shorthanded.” On the opposition, he gives Andrea Lunsford’s (a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University) opinion on the argument. Thompson says that, “from 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples-everything from in class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.” She found that young people today are actually not developing bad writing skills, or losing literacy, but they are writing more due to all this technology, she found that only 38 percent of writing occurred in class. She also found that students now days are much better at what’s called “kairos”, kairos is a way of assessing your audience and adapting to their tone and technique to best get your point across. Currently, writing is much more conversational and public, but 50 years ago it was much more essay based. I say that it is neither one of these beliefs of Sutherland and Lunsford; I do believe that we are writing much more as a youth, such as Lunsford states, but we are not writing in the right way. We shorten words, spell them wrong, use slang, and don’t use correct English in almost all the writing we do (Facebook, texting, emails, etc.). Practicing these bad habits all the time, makes them permanent, and makes us worse writers, if we wrote less, but everything we wrote was correct, then we would be excellent writers. Therefore, I say that it’s not how much you write, it’s whether you write correctly or not.

John Critchlow