Clive Thompson on the New Literacy - 3 views
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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) 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. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
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Ed Webb on 26 Aug 09Quite so. This is one reason I have students blog where practicable.
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The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
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When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
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Stanford 1st year students - check the applicant profile - http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/profile.html These are among the top tiered students in the country.
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know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good
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"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
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Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment
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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.
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good