Having just finished lots and lots of ENGL 101 grading, I found myself particularly drawn to this short article on Andrea Lunsford's Stanford Study of Writing.
"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.
The first thing she found is that 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. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
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.
Perhaps this is why these days I seem to have fewer students who say "I don't like to write." At the same time, I am not sure about the idea that students are "adept at...assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique" for different audiences. Maybe that's because I just got yet another one sentence, run-on sentence, salutation-free, punctuation-free, capital-letter-free email from a student. That stuff might be okay for a Facebook exchange between friends, but it sure annoys one's English teacher.
Still, it's nice to see a study about writing that is full of so much good news.
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