Reading Response #1: New Literacy

Gurjot Ram

1/10/10

English 100- Reading Response 1

In the article, “The New Literacy,” Clive Thompson supports Andrea Lunsford’s idea that technology is changing the way we write and explains that, “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution.” Lunsford discusses that technology is enhancing our writing because it is pushing it out in, “bold new directions.” Lunsford explains that students are writing more because they want to explain their own ideas. Lunsford’s opposition, John Sutherland has said that this new technology is destroying the writing and that it molded into, “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” Lunsford disagrees with John Sutherland’s ideology because she thinks that technology saving our writing. She also thinks that students express their own ideas. Lunsford has explained that even though that today, people text a lot she hasn’t found one example of text speak. Before Internet, most Americans never wrote anything. Lunsford collected data from her project, “Stanford Study of Writing,” which develops her conclusions. She found that today many people write more. Lunsford also found that today many students write for an audience because it gives them a sense of what is good writing.

My own view is that technology enhances our ability to write. Though I concede that John Sutherland has made a good point that texting language has made it into classrooms, I still maintain that technology helps us more than it hurts us. Through this new technology, we have the chance to communicate and find information that will make us enhance our writing. Texting and Facebook, for example, have changed the way we talk and share our information with others. We tend to share our information with others because that enhances our ideas. Blogging, for example, allows us to share our ideas with other people and allows people to agree or disagree with the claim that we have made. Technology helps us write because students find new words instead of the ones that we usually use. Many people have criticized that texting will find a way into papers and this will change the way that we write. I think that people today realize when they are on a cell phone and texting or writing a paper. They know what they are writing because they know the situation. For this reason, I think that there will never be academic papers with text speak. In modern society, we evolve and so does our writing because we can not compare our writing to what it was 100 years ago. We have the Internet which allows us to discover new words and use them in context. As we become more knowledgeable with technology our vocabulary enhances as well. This issue is important because technology isn’t destroying our writing as John Sutherland stated, it is reviving our writing and we are able to write in new ways that we had never done before. Technology changes the way we write because it allows us to share our ideas and explore new ways to write. Technology is changing our writing and will do so.