Reading Response

“Texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald and sad shorthand”, suggested English professor John Sutherland from the University College of London. Some people believe students are losing the ability to write because of all the technology available these days. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc…encourages student to write about school unrelated issues which distracts them from school lessons. Texting is also believed to be one of the problems because it gets in the way of practicing proper grammar. Do you believe technology is causing illiteracy?
Andréa Lunsford claims that technology is improving creativity and ability in student writing. Stanford Study of Writing shows that student these days do more writing then ever before . Lunsford concludes that technology is reviving and pushing our literacy in a new direction. Now that internet is available students are a lot more interested in writing. Most students email or text message their friends through out the day, they do a lot more writing than they realize. Internet chat rooms are helping students be more comfortable with showing their writing in public which also motivates them to improve their writing skills because they know who’s reading it and why they’re reading it. Technology is improving persuasive writing, because something as simple as recommending a restaurant improves persuasive skills. Although Clive Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that technology is improving student writing.
My own view is that sites such as Mysapce and Facebook, is improving student writing because it‘s something that is popular among young people and they do more reading and writing there than in school. In school, instructors require you to write about a certain topic which I think blocks me from thinking creatively plus the only audience in the classroom is the instructor. Emailing, texting, or updating my Myspace profile could be as simple as describing my trip to the mall to what I feel about a world related issue, there are no restrictions to my writing. Knowing that people read my Myspace profile makes me write in a more interesting way to keep the readers interested. After I graduated high school the only writing I would do were updating my Myspace profile or text messaging my friends which kept writing. Though I concede that technology is distracting student learning in class, I still maintain that it‘s helping us become better writers. For example most of the writing I do is outside of the classroom on the internet or texting on my phone. Although some might object that texting and emailing is affecting my grammar and spelling, I reply that it‘s making my writing more creative and more interesting. The issue is important because this type of technology wasn’t available to the generations before us. Therefore we need to develop a way to use this technology to our advantage, and possibly use this in student curriculum.