What They Say About New Literacy

Clive Thompson wrote about the new literacy in our culture today and what he thinks has been true about the way our generation has changed writing. He believes that “texting has dehydrated the language into ‘bleak, bald sad shorthand.’” That of which, he quoted from an English professor at London University. Thompson goes on the talk about how the use of the internet has influenced our generation to talk and write more than compared to those prior top us, even though the writing we do is typically to an ‘audience.’ My own view is that the internet has sparked a newly found interest in literature, for the generation in live in and it continues to grow. Though I believe that the type of writing teens do isn’t just to ramble on about nothing, it has to have some sense of meaning. Facebook is there to communicate with people you wouldn’t normally see. While texting is to talk to friends to plan dates. These two ways of communication aren’t going to corrupt the basic grammar and spelling that is used in school. For example, Lunsford from London University collected 14,672 student writing samples and said, “Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it- and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. This shows that not all the new changes in technology and writing have made every piece of writing people turn in or print out, into ‘sad shorthand’. Although some might object that writing as either good or bad, I reply that it depends on not only the reader but the writer. When someone believes a piece of writing is awful they go by what they believe is to be necessarily bad, they must have a reason. Not all the reasons will be the same in every one’s writing. Just think of what we’re comparing to the new types of writing people do. Before, “Americans never wrote anything ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.” Having people write more, should be a major jump on its own. We could still be without the advances in the internet and people wouldn’t be practicing any type of literature. Just because the generation now writes differently outside of school, doesn’t mean it’s gone down to become bad. It’s gone to become more like the Greek civilization. Forums and blogs are there to create ideas to inspire arguments and one another’s ideas. This just shows that our main focus of writing has changed. that doesn’t mean we’ve completely abandoned the way we write in school. This is a good thing the writing we do outside of school has created a new way for people to write to others. This issue is a good thing because “texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing” Hasn’t been shown to be much besides a myth. Lunsford examined work by first-year students, the ones I would see as being the most textually active, and in there work she didn’t find a single example of ‘texting speak” in an academic paper. This shows that our generation can be well into texting and never show the miss use off grammar that they might in a text. People may stereotype our generation to not know how to write well when it comes to what we write online in blogs, or in a text. But it’s just that we use Facebook outside of school and people aren’t used to it like the generation before us. So, when you look at the larger view of what our generation writes in comparison to school and home, you will find results close to what Lunsford did.