Reading Response#1: Using They Say/ I Say to Discuss "New Literacy"

When it comes to the topic of modern day literacy, most of us will agree that our modern day literacy is being affected negatively because of modern day technologies such as texting, Facebook, Twitter, and other ways of technological writing. Where this argument usually ends, however, is on the question of weather this new age of literacy is really damaging our current generation. Wheras some are convinced that the youthful portion of our generation is now considered to hold less literacy skills. I use to hold this similar beliefs that our generation was less skilled at writing. But after reading "The New Literacy" by Clive Thompson, the author questions these assumptions on our current generations literacy skills. The Author questions the general assumptions made others and even quotes from University of London, English Proffesor John Sutherland who states that modern day techonologies have made the english a dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, and shorthand". Thompson condradicts this by provding useful statistics and references to current college studies of modern day college students. The data collected shows that students today shows a great knack for writing and never display shorthand writings such as in texting. Thompson goes on to further explain that our modern day generation demonstrates more active writing than previous generations and even compares our writing similar to that of the greeks because our generation writes for an audience rather than one person.
My own view was that students today had bad literacy skills and were negativly affected by the incorporation of technology in writing. Though I concede that my viewpoint should be questioned, I still maintain my opinion that techonolgy aids student in skills such as spelling and vocabulary. For example, current students rely too much on technology to aid their writing, and students heavily rely on functions such as spell check for their writing. Although some might object that technology doesn't aid students to a huge degree with their writing skills and technology doesn't hinder any of their writing skills, I reply that techonolgy can be used as a beneficial way for students to imporve writing skills, but students shouldn't rely on technology to do so. This issue is important because our modern day generation is surrounded technology that helps them to write more. So as a society we need to figure out if these technologies are beneficial or detrimenal to our future generations of writers. In conclusion I will quote an unnamed student in our class who said "A pencil is a tool we can use to write, but if you wanted too, you could use that pencil to poke someones eye out". This can be applied to the incorporation of writing in technolgy, in that, technolgy is a tool we can use to write, but like everything else, if we use technology in the wrong way it could become hazardous to our writing skills.