We are in the middle of a literacy revolution, the like of which has not been since since the Greeks invented writing in the first place, says Standford writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford.
Lunsford has conducted a five-year study of college student writing. Between 2001 and 2006, she collected more than 11,000 pieces of student writing and found that students writing today have a greater sense of their audience than any generation before them.
Clive Thompson, writing about the study in the most recent issue of Wired, says that the students have an astonishing grasp of kairos, the rhetorical ability to assess one’s audience and adapt your message to best influence them. “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,” Thompson writes.
Thompson:
“We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.”
I hate to admit it, but I think that Thompson and Lunsford are on target here. While I’m a journalist and have a notion of what is right and what is wrong, stylistically, in writing, I also acknowledge that plenty of meaningful communication happens outside of formal styles and patterns of writing.
But this spawn of New Writers will be limited to more urban areas for a few more years. I base that statement on my time spent teaching college freshman writing classes at Montana State University. I asked students to write blogs and to post to message boards and to read each other’s writing. I was trying to instill in them the idea that they were writing for an audience and that these thoughts — the ones they manifested for my ENGL 121 class — were useful outside of class, whether they were studying engineering or nursing.
Well, my attempts to get them to write socially were abysmal failures, for the most part. They just didn’t accept that my course was anything more than a dreaded prerequisite they had to get out of the way to complete their core requirements. Yet I’m fairly sure they went back to their dorm rooms in the evening and chatted it up online and on their Facebook profiles.
Perhaps things have changed even more in the years since I was a teacher. Facebook has grown even hotter than it was then — back when it was just open to college students. I’m quite certain that every student arriving on campus this fall already has some sort of social networking profile set up online. I think the teachers teaching ENGL 121 now (it’s not called that anymore, something like WRIT 101, I think) will be most successful at engaging their students if they find a way to bring that online social interaction into the classroom. Hitch a wagon to that comet, so to speak.
As for the quality of writing, well, many of the freshmen I taught had a hard enough time putting subjects and verbs together. “Style,” in the literary sense, was not on their radar. I’m of the opinion that anything that gets them stringing words together is a good thing, since a little more practice seldom hurts anyone.
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My Clips
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
Not since the Greeks...
We are in the middle of a literacy revolution, the like of which has not been since since the Greeks invented writing in the first place, says Standford writing and rhetoric professor Andrea Lunsford.
Lunsford has conducted a five-year study of college student writing. Between 2001 and 2006, she collected more than 11,000 pieces of student writing and found that students writing today have a greater sense of their audience than any generation before them.
Clive Thompson, writing about the study in the most recent issue of Wired, says that the students have an astonishing grasp of kairos, the rhetorical ability to assess one’s audience and adapt your message to best influence them. “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,” Thompson writes.
Thompson:
I hate to admit it, but I think that Thompson and Lunsford are on target here. While I’m a journalist and have a notion of what is right and what is wrong, stylistically, in writing, I also acknowledge that plenty of meaningful communication happens outside of formal styles and patterns of writing.
But this spawn of New Writers will be limited to more urban areas for a few more years. I base that statement on my time spent teaching college freshman writing classes at Montana State University. I asked students to write blogs and to post to message boards and to read each other’s writing. I was trying to instill in them the idea that they were writing for an audience and that these thoughts — the ones they manifested for my ENGL 121 class — were useful outside of class, whether they were studying engineering or nursing.
Well, my attempts to get them to write socially were abysmal failures, for the most part. They just didn’t accept that my course was anything more than a dreaded prerequisite they had to get out of the way to complete their core requirements. Yet I’m fairly sure they went back to their dorm rooms in the evening and chatted it up online and on their Facebook profiles.
Perhaps things have changed even more in the years since I was a teacher. Facebook has grown even hotter than it was then — back when it was just open to college students. I’m quite certain that every student arriving on campus this fall already has some sort of social networking profile set up online. I think the teachers teaching ENGL 121 now (it’s not called that anymore, something like WRIT 101, I think) will be most successful at engaging their students if they find a way to bring that online social interaction into the classroom. Hitch a wagon to that comet, so to speak.
As for the quality of writing, well, many of the freshmen I taught had a hard enough time putting subjects and verbs together. “Style,” in the literary sense, was not on their radar. I’m of the opinion that anything that gets them stringing words together is a good thing, since a little more practice seldom hurts anyone.
Related posts: