The New Literacy?

From the Stanford Study of Writing comes news that the internet isn't lobotomizing us electronically after all. As Clive Thompson of Wired reports, young people are writing more than ever before as their communications become ever more text based. And the same is true those no longer in school. Key passage:

"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.

In his recent book, A Better Pencil, Dennis Baron argues that computers and related communications technologies have enhanced both our opportunities and abilities to write. If we take the time to think about this, far more of our communication takes place through writing, and perhaps even more important, we are less and less consumers of the written word and more and more producers. This is undoubtedly a good thing.