The New Literacy

摘要

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write-and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and tex-ting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of LondonEnglish professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age ofrnilliteracy is at hand, right? Andrea Lunsford isn't 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 samples-everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.