Clive Thompson's Literacy

In Clive Thompson's recent essay “The New Literacy”, he describes how our literacy is changing, and not necessarily for the worse. He cites John Sutherland talking about how kids today cannot write, because “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays”. Andrea Lunsford provides an opposite point for his paper. She is doing a study of student writing at Stanford, and has collected over 14,000 student writing samples of all sorts. She concludes that students are now writing more and more out of class, and are usually writing to an audience. Lunsford says that students are especially good at kairos, which is assessing the audience and changing what they're saying to fit the situation.

Thompson makes a strong point that we are writing more than people of past generations, and what we classify as 'good' writing must change. People usually classify good or important writings as essays or books that are long and boring. People are writing more and more today, and it is usually just enough to communicate the necessary idea. Who is to say this isn't good writing? Who gets to decide whats good and bad? For someone to be able to judge any writing, they need first to understand why the piece was written. Writing without a set purpose is useless. A true judgment of writing must not be made on the length of the piece. Thompson's essay is about a page long, making a page long summary of it pointless, they could just read the original piece. Text messages and Facebook messages are usually short, but still communicate all the necessary information. If someone is swimming through the sea of Facebook statuses, they are unlikely to read all the long ones.

The problem with English classes today, is teachers believe that they are teaching people valuable life skills, that will benefit them later. Granted there is aspects of the English language that is relevant to every day life, but most of it isn't. Poetry isn't possible to teach or evaluate, because of what it fundamentally is. Looking for the symbolism in a book is irrelevant to everyone except English majors. Being able to write an effective letter could benefit everyone eventually, but that isn't taught in English class. English itself isn't a science, there is no right and wrong. Beyond spelling, grammar, and sentence structure, it isn't any one person's ability to judge if a writing is good or not, it is the collective opinion of the intended audience that is true judge of writing. Language, at its root, is a tool to allow people to communicate effectively, to share their ideas, and to further understanding of other subjects.