Reading Response #1

In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggests even though it isn't always for anything important, more and more younger people seem to be writing more. Thompson urges us to not be judgmental about how we write, just be very greatful that more people are writing.

One implication of Thompsons' treatment of the future of writing is the comparisons of traditional writing and writing with the technology of this generation. John Sutherland, a University College of London English professor, has moaned, Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand." An age of illiteracy is at hand, right? Whereas Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, isn't so sure. The first thing Lunsford found was that young people today write far more than any generation before them, an example of this is, of all the writing her Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent took place outside of the classroom-life writing, as Lunsford calls it, included Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself, which do add up. Thompson adds, before the internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment, unless the job involved producing text. Students today almost always write for an audience , the Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing, because it had no audience, but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. And, writing from TV-show recaps to 15000-word video game walkthroughs, has given young people a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while collaborating with others.

My own view is that people have always thought of typical American students as, not as bright as the rest of the world, English and Math, both, are being neglected. Though I concede that writing doesn't seem to be on the Hi Lo, I still maintain that students are very smart, they just don't get the credit they deserve. For example, before cell phones and texting messages came about, not alot of students liked English, or liked to learn it, and now with the texting options that a cell phone has, students get a better understanding of writing and reading, not just the high school/ college level, but grade schoolers also. Although some might object that texting on the cell phones isn't really doing anything, but being a distraction, I reply to those people that everyone is texting and learning at the same time, it may only be basic English, but its kind've like subliminal, you're learning and don't realize it. I was never much into texting, but I've seen lots of it done, and I think the issue is important, because cell phones are here now, like the computers and the internet, we are learning more, not less, and its just beginning to get a lot more technological. There's so much to learn, and if it can be done differently, then why not?