Reading Response to Birkerts

My essay is focused on agreeing with Andrea Lunsford in saying literacy is not dying, but thriving. As I said it best, "..they are forcing a coloring of the pages in the book of today's literacy." Yes, i agree that things like texting, facebook and cell phones take away from the learning experience of the classroom, but that's another topic. As for the raw wording and ideas the individuals use, are flourishing, being forced in new directions.

Opposing my essay's main point, Sven Birkerts, from his book The Owl Has Flown, talks about the move from vertical learning to horizontal learning, meaning intensive reading to extensive. Birkerts states, "Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from ons site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly." To ball all that into a few less words, Birkerts is saying that because of the mass amount of text available at any given time, its very hard for the reader to want to take time to examine a text in depth, because there are so many other things out there to but attention into.

This is a very strong point presented, and it definately makes me rethink my essay's focus, but i don't think it would actually change it. Although I agree completely with Birkerts, they're almost speaking on different topics: Lunsford on writing, Birkerts on reading. Yes, it is harder, very near impossible to some, to deepen the reading's influence in the text their ingesting, but I still feel Lunsford makes a point that our prose is beautifying. At least on my level, because all this writing's out there, I'm forced to try and say it all differently, because no one wants to regurgitate, or listen to such information, so we find ourselves striving to, if not say something different, but at least retell the story better and with more color.