Clive Thompson

We have all heard the arguments over todays younger generation: whether or not they are coming to an age of illiteracy. In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggests that todays students are not coming to that age of illiteracy but on the contrary we are bringing back Greek tradition from fifty years ago. In his article, "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy", Thompson maintains that "students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago." In making this comment Thompson argues that students are not as dumb as people think, instead we have great skill in the area of assessing our audience and adapting to their tone which is a difficult task to most. Thompson also seems to think that todays young people write far more than any other generation before them. He describes this in his article, "young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text." Thompson is insisting that students today are bettering themselves with all this writing; and it's for an audience that they are trying to appeal to. My own view is that Clive Thompson does have a valid point and yes I agree it's hard to capture a specific audience with writing and students today do it well; but what about spelling and grammar and such? I have first hand experience from being in classrooms for most of my life and for an example what I have witnessed is that students today don't have spelling skills or puncuation skills. Although some like Clive might object that in studies students have had great spelling in their writings in school, I reply that it's a little something called spell check and they aren't doing it on their own. The issue is important because if students aren't able to spell or correctly place a comma in a sentence without help from MicrosoftWord then I do fear we are coming to an age of illiteracy.