Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

Posted on November 27, 2009 in Off Topic | No Comments

A quick scan of social media sites and one might take a doubtful view of the future of literacy. But those are merely growing pains – a generation ago, those very same people would have never composed a sentence outside of school. The truth is, we are in a new age of literacy…

…Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the 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, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

— Wired.com| Read The Full Article