Hope Reading Response #1

In Clive Thompson's article “The New Literacy” he agrees with Lunsford's five year study that ''...Were in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we have never seen since Greek civilization'' he agrees with her study and refers to it throughout his article.
Lunsford's mentions that “technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it, and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.” In his recent work, Thompson suggests that technology has caused a big paradigm shift, he states that “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text.” he points out that Americans now are writing. he also goes on to mention the difference in how this generation writes by comparing to how they wrote 50 years ago. Before the Internet the only audience who read the students writing were teachers which when they wrote it was in a way that would satisfy the teachers requirements and standards on what is considered ''good writing'' and get them a good grade. Now because the audience is so diverse writing has become more about persuading, organizing and debating. Lunsford disagrees with John Sutherland when he said that “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering...and texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” Lunsford disproved this theory when she went on to examine writings of first-year students, and she did not find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
My own view is I agree with Andrea Lunsford. My reasoning being she has conducted a five year study to verify her ideas. Where as John Sutherland as far as I know, has no prolonged study to back up what he is trying to prove. Based on my own personal experience I would have to agree with Thompson's statement that outside of required writing for the classroom or jobs, nobody wrote until technologies came along to make it convenient and more meaningful. The only writing I myself did before technology came my way was writing that I was required to do. I began to write on the Internet and text as soon as I learned how. Without that being available to me I would never write.
Though students are generally young people that does not mean they are unintelligent, and would put text slang into a professional paper, and texting causes problems when it came to professional writing. John Sutherland seems to apply this concept into his thinking as Thompson does not say directly, but indirectly implies when he quotes John Sutherland in the beginning of his article complaining about texting, and later brings up the myth that texting short-forms and smiley's is defiling serious academic writing. He denies Sutherland's opinion as incorrect when he provides proof from Lunsford's study that showed texting has no negative affect on the way young people write, and they do not apply text short hand into academic writing. This issue is important because people need to accept, and face the reality that technology does not negatively affect the way a person writes, but on the contrary, it has improved the way young people express themselves through their written work, and causes them to write outside of what is required of them to a different audience other than a professor or an employer.