Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

In his recent work, "The New Literacy," Clive Thompson suggests that kids these days are becoming better writers. He starts off with talking about a professor's project, Andrea Lunsford, who collected class assignments, projects, and other essays. Lunsford collected these items for years and discovered that there was not any text language used in any of there work. Even though earlier in the article. Thompsoon gives another professors opinion, John Sutherland, that technology is killing kid's ability to write good. And that it's making our language bleak, bald, and sad shorthand. But Lunsford's opinion is that those Facebook and Twitter updates actually improve kids writing. Since they get more practices at writing outside of school. Back in the say people would only write for academic purposes and for jobs that required writing. But kids these days write a lot more because of technology. Lunsford also found at that of all the writing that the Stanford students did, they only did 62 percent of it in the class room and the last 38 percent out of the class room. Thompson claims that kids today are becoming better writers than those of the past, through the opinions and quotes if Lunsford. And that technology gives kids today more opportunities to write. Thompson hints that all those little messages that people do through texting, emails, and Twittering add up and tunes up your writing skills.
My own view is that technology is helping kid's today ability to write. It makes sense to me that all those extra things kids do outside of school makes them better writers. I think that kids should be encouraged to use technology the extra practice seems to pay off. Only writing when told to like fifty years ago would make your writing dryer then if you wrote daily on your own choice. Though I concede that texting acronyms and short hand writing could ruin kid's ability to make good sentence structure and spelling and word choice. But I still maintain the idea that overall technology helps people become better writers. For example if someone is constantly texting people daily they will be introduced new words in real life situations through there received texts and in turn use them in there own texts back to other people. Although some might object and say that texting will make it so you forget or just never learn how to spell words the right way and never really learn new words because of constant usage of acronyms. I reply that it could happen that way with some people with knowledge of new words to them. This issue is important because people are saying that texting and technology are bad and this would discourage the use of it. When really it should be the other way around and people should be using it more and more. People like writing when there's an audience and not to just one person or teacher.