Clive Barker's New Literacy article

Wherever you go, you will most likely hear people saying, "Oh writing and literature are dying out. Its all because of these new fangled gadgets like text messaging and emails". To this I say, "WRONG"!! Literature and writing are not dying out. Like the rest of mankind and every other living things on this planet, it is simply evolving. Times are changing, therefore so must our way of doing things. One prominent writer, Clive Thompson of Livewire magazine, seems to agree with this statement. He published an article on how writing is evolving rapidly thanks to texting and emails.
In his article, Thompson writes, "As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. 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?
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose.”
He goes on to give examples of how text messaging and emails are adding up to a considerable amount of writing, far more than someone from, say, 50 years ago might have written. Thee main reason that electronic writing is so popular and successful is due mainly to the fact that students can, and are, writing to an audience. If a student were asked to write something like an essay in class, they would be utterly bored and the only person who would read what they wrote would be the teacher.
Another issue that someone who clings to old ideals would complain about is possible slang used in modern works of literature. This I strongly believe is also false. I myself, as well as Clive Thompson and his associate Andrea Lunsoford, have seen other students use slang in everyday conversations and text messaging. However when looking at their professional work, its easy to see that they are trying to keep slang out of their work, or at least keep it to a minimum.
Now one must consider what slang and abbreviation terms are used for. When you are writing a text message, you are constrained to a certain number of characters per message. This being the case, people use phrases and terms like b/c, w/e, wtf (I will not discuss what that means) and so on and so forth. This allows one to convey a message, keep it to the point, and save a large amount of space. As for other slang terms that do not apply to shortening a text message, there are many uses for slang terms. However they may have only certain meaning to the one that the student or person is trying to address. You wont find someone in professional writing coming up to you and start spewing slang unless you know, or they think you know, what it means.

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