Quality Education & Care
The New Literacy
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Thursday, October 1, 2009 1:49 PM EDT
"We are in the midst of a literary revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization!" This bold proclamation comes from Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford, and certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom that modern technology is turning students into non-writers. However, Lunsford analyzed nearly 15,000 examples of prose of college students — class assignments, formal essays, journal entries, e-mails, and blog posts — and shared these conclusions in Wired magazine (September 2009; wired.com)...
* Technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
* Young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.
* Students are remarkably adept at assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.
* Students defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them writing is about persuading and organizing and debating. They are least enthusiastic about in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor.
The brevity of online texting and twittering teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
September 22, 2009