"A New Literacy" response

                In Clive Thompson’s article published in Wired Magazine titled “A New Literacy” he explains with the help of two professors that technology isn’t exactly hurting the younger generation’s writing abilities. Instead Thompson states that young people today write far more than any generation before them. Thompson starts off his article with a statement from London Professor John Sutherland who briefly rants about how kids today do not know how to write and technology is to blame for the “age of illiteracy that is at hand.” Then comes in Andrea Lunsford, a professor at Stanford University, with a different point of view and the facts to it up. Lunsford conducted a study where she collected over 14,000 writing samples from different areas of writing from students. She found that 38 percent of writing took place outside of the student’s academic lives. This is because of the Facebook and Twitter updates, the texts and blogging students do on a day-to-day basis. Lunsford explains that this new kind of text is teaching the students a useful skill when it comes to writing; they are now able to assess their audience and adapt the way their writing sounds and looks to best get their point across to a variety of listeners. The student’s ability to adapt for their audiences gives them a different sense of what good writing is. Lunsford proves Sutherland wrong when she examined the writing of first year college students and none of which had any type of texting speak when in the form of an academic paper. It has been made very clear that online media is putting literacy into a new and “cooler” direction. “We think of writing as either good or bad what today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”

                My own views is that I completely agree with Lunsford and Thompson’s ideas of today’s youth does indeed know how to write and now know that knowing who your audience is maybe the key to good writing. Though I concede that some students are not writing to their best ability or as much as they could, I still maintain that the expectations of Lunsford and Thompson are exceeded with how much the average student blogs, texts, updates their Facebook. For example I know several people and myself included who use Facebook to keep in touch with their family and friends from high school and who use blogs as a place to write for themselves but is open for others to read and respond to. Although some might object that since when communicated with our peers we get “lazy” and use short hand writing and acronyms to be able to reply as fast as possible, I reply that though this is true for some, it’s not true for all. Along with in Lunsford’s study she claimed that she didn’t find of sample of academic writing that had “texting speak” used. This issue is important because for one to just assume that because today’s youth write primarily through online media doesn’t mean we don’t know how to write. We are just adapting to who, why and what we are writing; we are expanding our minds to new ways to get our point across to all types of audiences.