The New Literacy
New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students’ writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s 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 classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.
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.
Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter
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Is Cursive Handwriting Necessary?
Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.
“I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”
What do you think? Is it important for children to learn cursive, or should it go the way of the dinosaur? Link -via Digg
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Bad Fiction Winners 2009
Yes, in the midst of sweet, sunny, sweltering, early-summer days, with the gnats swirling around your head and the bees singing their bzzzzy song, the incomparable results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have risen from the depths of a writer’s dark and stormy mind to torture readers yet again. And if you think that sentence was bad, you should read this year’s winning entry:
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
That gem was written by 55-year-old David McKenzie of Federal Way, Washington. Honors also go to runner-up Warren Blair of Ashburn, Virginia and winners in various fiction categories. Link
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The 7 Most Impressive Libraries Throughout History
Ever since the dawn of civilization, men have demonstrated their cultural sophistication, scientific knowledge and philosophical aptitude in written word kept in libraries for peers and, less often, the public, to access and review.
We have a tendency to assume that knowledge and the availability thereof is a modern concept, but in actuality the huge Great Library of Alexandria and the Celsus library in Ephesus prove that the concept of libraries is an ancient one.
We tend to take for granted the notion that the people of the world can or should be taught to read. The ability to read is even used as an indicator of poverty and development. In 1998, the UN defined 80% of the world population as literate, defined as the ability to read and write a simple sentence in a language. It was not always thus. In ancient times, literacy was the trade secret of professional scribes.
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NaNoWriMo Success!!
I won! 50,039 words with three hours to spare. How did the rest of you NaNo participants do? Will you do it again next year? Are you celebrating? I am, although it’s a pretty meager celebration: a beer and some guilt-free Internet surfing. Leave a comment and let us know how you ended up!
And, previously on Neatorama:
NaNoWrimo is Upon Us
NaNoWriMo Progress
The Ravings of a Mad (almost) Novelist
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