The New Literacy

While many have made the assumption that today kids can't write because of all the technology they are surrounded with, Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, has discovered from her research that we're probably :

... in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization ...

according Clive Thompson in Wired magazine :

... technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions. ... 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.

Lunsford's team also found that the quality of the writing was high with writers better able to assess their audience :

... adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.... The fact that students today almost always write for an audience ... gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world.

And they apparently didn't find a single instance of text-speak in the writing sampled, putting to rest another myth.

There's an interesting comment on the Wired piece at The New Yorker. Thessaly la Force says that she isn't surprised at Lunsford's findings, and says :

It seems safe to argue that we still don’t know very much about how people are using social media and technology to communicate.