Amber Lindsey
04/08/2010
English 100
Reading Response 1: Using They Say/I Say to Discuss “The New Literacy”
When it comes to the topic of teenagers and how they communicate electronically, most parents will readily agree that were concerned how it’s affecting our children’s intellect. Does it take away from academics? Does it make our children slaves to electronics? Have they forgotten how to communicate verbally? Is this just another form of our society losing human to human contact? Where the agreement usually ends, is the question of how are we going to deal with it. Whereas some are convinced that this is a passing phase, others maintain that texting and public forums like Facebook are just the beginning.
Clive Thompson’s article “The New Literacy” sheds some light on why we probably don’t have to worry so much about the ‘damage all this texting is doing’. His article has brought to the forefront two equally impressive professors and their thoughts on this subject. They are, University of London English Professor, John Sutherland and Stanford University Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford.
John Sutherland feels that “kids to can’t write and technology is to blame”. He has moaned that “PowerPoint and video have replaced carefully crafted essays, while texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand’”
In my opinion, Andrea Lunsford actually backs up her comments with proof, as Clive writes in his article. ‘She has created a mammoth project called “Stanford Study of Writing” to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples-everything from in-class assignments to formal essays. She also collected electronic forms which included emails, blog posts and chat sessions. What she found was that young people today are writing far more than any generation before them. They have a sense of what constitutes good writing and they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading, organizing and debating. ‘
As Clive reiterates, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. It’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. Clive hints at the importance of writing long and complex pieces of prose, while collaborating with others.
This article opened my eyes. Though I concede that texting and “tweets” is not the end of the world, I still maintain that it’s important to have face to face social skills. Although some might object, I can’t be the only parent who doesn’t enjoy every conversation interrupted by cute little sounds announcing the most recent incoming text. The issue is important because we don’t want to encourage the end of face to face contact. Paying attention to what’s happening in real life, in front of your face, instead of the thousands of little minutia texts asking “what’s up” and ending with ‘lol’, should be the priority.