Reading Response #1

4/7/2010

Cai Pencil

Reading Response #1

Todays new writing involved in social trends like twitter, facebook, cellphone texting, etc are under constant scrutiny. In Clive Thompson's article “On the new literacy”, based on tests conducted by Andrea Lunsford, Professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University during her project “Stanford study of writing”, it is suggested that the new generation of writing does not "dehydrate" as been said by others, but instead is a revolutionary jump in writing our society today.

Thompson seems to imply the importance of voicing your opinion to an audience is a crucial factor pertaining to writing. If your never told that your wrong, how will you ever know?(though for some being told that their wrong does not mean a thing). I too find that it is important to be confident enough to voice your opinion. For instance, the discussion in my English class this morning of “what makes a good discussion group?”. It was agreed by more than one student including myself that you should not fear being judged for voicing your opinion, if you want to advance as an critical thinker, which also seems to be part of the topic of this class.

The examples Thompson used for the defense of this particular type of writing seems to have been mostly of twitter, and blogs and or reviews. Such as the example of some individual writing a movie review. I could understand why these examples seem as though they are most crucial, but what of the e-mails, google(or other methods of surfing the Internet such as Craigs list, Yahoo, and Bing), facebook , myspace, etc? I feel as though when I look at or interact with these situations in which I myself do most of my writing, it does not contain detailed or even regular sentence structures (with the exception of emails, which I for the most part write letters for business or personal errands, so nothing that is very long and personal). So does it really make us as an society less educated? Probably not. But I do somewhat agree with the quote from John Sutherland cited in Thompson's article with Sutherland's claim that facebook, texting, etc, does make our writing somewhat “bleak, bald, sad shorthand”. I don't want to admit that I have been victimized by this social shift in our society, but I feel as though the lack of education combined with the use of the Internet on a daily basis has dulled at least my spelling and punctuation. You spend years in front of a computer taking advantage of the spell check and other automated tools and it will put you out of practice. Thompson also argues that there is no case of “texting speak”, the study for this fact was conducted on 1st year students. Yes, I do agree that if your in school you will definitely have a better chance of not making a grammatical error. But even students in their 1st year at Stanford University is probably more or less in tune with their college study skills than most of the general public is. As for the general public, I feel as though the idea that revolutionary style of writing contributing to the degeneration of our fine tuned writing ability is definitely plausible.

So, in conclusion, I really have to agree with both sides of the argument Clive Thompson presented in his article. Is the Scrutiny that John Sutherland argues far fetched? I think not. Still, based on Andrea Lunsfords' study of writing at Standford, Thompson's point that critical thinkers should have an audience is, I must agree, an essential for creating a paper that is a bit more heartfelt