"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

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment

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.

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