New Literacy summery and response

Summery: In Clive Thompson’s article "New Literacy", Thompson talks about different peoples views on how technology is effecting student academic writing. Some professors think technology is helping our writing, well others strongly disagree. Professor John Sutherland himself writes, "Face book encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand."(Pg.1/p.1) In other words, Sutherland believes technology is making our writing worse. On the other hand professor Andrea Lunsford strongly disagrees with Sutherland stating that, "Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment."(Pg.1/p.5) According to Lunsford, the only reason writing outside of the classroom exists if because of technology. The article then goes on to say how technology is helping students write. Student’s text/write to many different audiences through texting and bloging and so on. By doing this students are learning how to adapt what they say to different audiences like, friends, teachers, parents. The article calls this Kairos. The article concludes by saying the most important thing about writing is knowing who your going to write to and why you are writing what you are writing. This gives you a purpose for what you are doing. Without knowing whom you are writing to, you don’t know how the reader will react to what you are writing. For example if you’re writing to a kid you’re not going to use big words.

Response: I think texting, bloging and so on, has made students writing better because whatever writing you do outside of the classroom or homework is just practice. The more practice you have the better of a writing you will become. Even a little practice is better than none. It doesn’t even matter if you abbreviate while texting or bloging, because your still generating ideas, working on putting them down and putting your words together to make your piece sound right and get your point across at the same time. I don’t thing texting or blogging or so on should be frowned upon because it helps a lot of kids learn how to become comfortable communicating their thoughts and views with others. The more you talk/write to someone the more comfortable you feel about being open with your views and ideas. I agree that technology has took its toll on our spelling, but how important is spelling? My teachers spell things wrong all the time but it still gets the point across, it isn’t like without that one word spelt right you don’t know what the whole things about. Famous people in my history book spelt almost every other word wrong but they were close enough that people understood what they were talking about and those famous people were governors, saints, kings, popes and so on. I think all writers now a day’s need technology to be successful in their careers because books aren’t published in pencil there typed and printed. Overall I think the more practice student are doing writing can only benefit them.