Assume that your reader is a college-level general audience who is not very familiar with the article you are responding to. Begin your essay by summarizing the articleIdentify the article by title and author. What problem is the author addressing? What argument does he make? What are the authors supporting claims? After briefly summarizing the article, present your argument in response to it. Do you agree with the author? Do you disagree? Do you agree in part, but not completely? Why? Support your argument using reasons derived from your own experiences and observations. Try to write your essay using conventional grammar and sentence structure. You do not know your audience, so you want the tone of your essay to be professional, not casual. The New Literacy by Clive Thompson Wired, Aug. 24, 2009, wired.comAs the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today cant writeand technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?Andrea Lunsford isnt so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing sampleseverything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.I think were in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we havent seen since Greek civilization, she says. For Lunsford, technology isnt killing our ability to write. Its reviving itand 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. Thats 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 classroomlife writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.Its almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasnt a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), theyd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsfords team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairosassessing 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. 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 its 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 didnt serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling seriousacademic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didnt find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But its also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesisfrom sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughshas given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.We think of writing as either good or bad. What todays young people know is that knowing who youre writing for and why youre writing might be the most crucial
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