Thopson by Taylor

In his recent work Clive Thompson suggests that technology is overall making us better writers, although others like John Sutherland disagree and think that it is diminishing our writing skills, I believe it is doing a little bit of both. Sutherland suggests that technology is to blame for all our writing problems, and that “face book encourages narcissistic blabbering” (1). I disagree with Sutherland simply because I myself use face book and not everyone (which he generalized) writes narcissistically. Thompson then follows a study lead by Andrea Lunsford who is a writing professor at Stanford University, where she collected 14,672 student-writing samples of all kinds. She concluded that technology is not killing our writing; it is reviving it and pushing our literacy in bold new directions (1). She also found that our generation writes more than anyone has written before because we use the Internet socially, and that before the internet people never wrote unless they had to for school or for there jobs. I will admit that I did not realize how much I actually wrote until I read this essay. She talks about “life writing” which consists of text messaging, emailing, twitter posts, face book updates, blogging or video game walkthroughs Lunsford believes that our best asset is that we know how to write to our audience and are able to adapt, she calls this kairos. She claims that modern day chat rooms are similar to the tradition of Greek argument. Once she looked over the writing sample she realized that she did not find any form of text language. I believe that this is true only because they were college students, and that if she were to take samples for junior high and high school students the results would be different. Clive goes on to say that we should not judge writing as good or bad, and that we are in the midst of a literacy revolution (1)