Reading Response #1

Martin Ramirez

Reading Response (Clive Thompson)

Anna Wolff

In previous discussions about “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy”, people have often argued whether technology now-a-days is dramatically reducing the standards for English writing. On one hand, the English professor from the University College of London says that Facebook, texting, email and other technological advances for writing, has “dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” He believes that these new forms of writing will inevitably replace the art of essay writing. Yet on the other hand, Andrea Lunsford, who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, states, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” As you can see the two have very different opinions about how modern technology is shaping the abilities of young people and their writing. Lunsford believes that because this generation of writers are blogging and chatting online, as opposed to writing letters or essays, the writers are able to practice Kairos. In a nutshell, Kairos is the ability to write as is you were speaking to an audience, adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across, as Clive Thompson put it. Lunsford believed that because writers using Facebook and emails to talk, and they are able to practice Kairos, they are getting a different feel for what good writing really is. While she was doing research, she found out that her firs-year students didn’t use a single example of “texting speak” in an academic paper. So she suggests that this era of technological advances is actually doing us good. Like I said before, Sutherland doesn’t really agree with that statement. Now I would have to agree with Lunsford. I do think that while writing, we should be focused on who we are writing to and how to best portray our ideas so that our audience can clearly understand our point of view. Now even though I do agree with Lunsford, I disagree with that fact that we are cutting out one on one conversation. People find it so easy to just text and email, that in some ways, it sort of does affect our abilities to speak to someone one on one, which is a valuable skill in the English language. So on that note, I don’t completely agree with Lunsford. Although I am not saying that I agree at all with Sutherland. He implies that we are losing our ability to write well and to correctly write an essay or a letter. I don’t agree with that because as I said before, in Lunsford’s research, she found no “text speak” in her first-year students academic papers. Her students writing their academic papers, could differentiate between what sloppy writing was when they were just talking to others, and what grammatically correct writing was. I believe this issue is important because, there is still ignorance to whether this new way of writing is decreasing the standards for essay writing. In conclusion, my beliefs are that, our writing skills are not suffering from texting, emailing, blogging etc. The only bad effect is that some people do lose the ability to have face to face conversations, which is essential in today’s society.