Technology and Writing

Do you think emailing, texting, Facebooking, and IM-ing is ruining kids' ability to write? Andrea Lunsford disagrees. Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, organized a five-year project called the Stanford Study of Writing to examine college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected over 14,000 student writing samples, ranging from formal essays, reading summaries, and in-class assignments to emails, chat sessions, and blog posts. Lunsford's conclusion suggests that, rather than literacy going to the dogs, “we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization.”

Lunsford discovered that young people today write far more than any generation before them because of all the socializing that takes place online. Lunsford refers to this as "life writing" since 38 percent of it occurs outside of the classroom. Clive Thompson, who writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Wired, and Fast Company, asks the obvious question:

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Mastering academic prose is always going to be an important goal for students, but I have to agree with Lunsford and Thompson. The possibilities of engagement, learning, and growth in online environments are endless.