Critics, are claiming that my generation is going through an age of poor literacy due to the wide spread use of "dumbed down" English. Many of these critics associate the wide spread use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for allowing the use of a short hand English to become dominant in our world. One of the biggest critics is John Sutherland who claims; that technology such as movie and various electronics have allowed for poor grammatical shorthand to become so popular in our culture that the "civil" language or the well crafted essay is designed is slowly being replaced, by this boring and dull shorthand.
Andrea Lunsford? Is a professor who has been collecting students work for the past five years, throughout these years she has graded nearly 15000 papers and has found no difference between students that would even lead to the "dumbing down" o a generation, and takes it one step farther claiming that we are going through a literary revolution almost as the Greeks did thousands of years ago. Lunsford argues that our generation relies on writing and similar thinking processes so much on a daily basis that it has just be come habit. But probably the biggest difference is that kids these days almost exclusively to a specific audience. Lunsford also believes that students have a Switch to control if they use proper format, in a formal essay, or use shorthand to talk to their buddies about the new movie that just came out.
I agree with the idea, that in a way there is a writing revolution going on because I never thought about how much time I really spend between chatting to my friends on the computer or texting, not all of the responses I give follow the rules I would use in a formal paper but it means that my brain is constantly leaning how to deal with new questions and how to formulate answers and opinions even if it's over something as silly as debating which movie to see. The key part to all of this, is knowing who your audience is and I agree with Thompson because even when writing an essay one of the most important steps is to know who you're writing for and how to present your material in a way that is most efficient and effective which our generation is able to handle, due to the heavy influence of writing in our lives.
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I agree with the general message of this post on almost all accounts. I believe that there is indeed a writing revolution going on, and that I haven't really given much thought to how much time I stop and spend chatting, or texting over the computer or phone. However, I disagree on the small fact that you must know who you are writing to is an important step in writing an essay. I think that presenting information accurately, and clearly holds more importance than just who your target audiance is.
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