Essay 1

Literacy: Forever in Motion

                        The world today is more fasted paced than it ever has been in all of human history.  Mankind is developing technologies that everything we do happen faster and with more immediate results.  With the creation of the internet information has also become more readily available to anyone that wants to access it with billions of people around the world having access to the internet.  Instead of picking up a book and reading it cover to cover to get information that you want, you can just open a web browser and just Google whatever it is that you want to know.  We have access to all of human history just at the click of a button.  With the easily available information and the speed at which it can be accessed the question can be asked, are we as a people becoming more and more illiterate?

            An argument can be made that we are, In Chris Hedges article America the Illiterate, Hedges uses a barrage of statistics to show that America is slowly becoming more and more illiterate.  His argument at first seems very strong because of the size of the numbers that he is using.  Statistics like, “There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”, sounded crazy to me and unbelievable.  I was interested to see a lack of cited sources at the end of the article which for me put the accuracy of these statistics in question.  In another article that I read, Is Google Making us Stupid by Nicholas Carr, Carr’s article is written in a way that lets the reader make his or her own decision about literacy and reading since the creation and explosion of internet reading and writing.  Carr, in my opinion uses reason and personal experience to argue his point as where Hedges uses what I would call “scare tactics” to in theory, scare his readers into thinking that we are all fifth-grade level readers and should read more books and improve vocabulary.  On the other hand, after reading Carr’s article, I found myself agreeing with him.  One of the great personal examples that he uses is, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” After reading this statement by Carr, it really got me thinking about my own personal reading habits and what I grew up reading which I think was Carr’s goal in writing this article. I thought about how I grew up in a digital age and most of the information I got was online.  I remember writing a research paper in high school where we were required to use paper books as a source even if the book had an eBook format.  It baffled me after remembering this that we had to be forced to use a paper copy of a book when fifty years ago that is all that was available.   

            Another article that I read by Andrew Sullivan called Why I Blog, Sullivan basically does what he tells us what he is going to do in the title and tells us why he blogs.  He mentions how in the early days of his blogging he would right about his thoughts on a specific event that has occurred.  He argues for the legitimacy of blogging as a form of writing and gives very convincing examples as to why it is.  He argues that with the creation of the internet information can be documented, checked, and rechecked by the thousands of people that are online daily and happen to read Sullivan’s post.  Reaction to the statement from other readers is immediate and can be immediately stated by said reader in the form of a comment on the original post.  This varies from original writing is the sense that if a news story breaks, the paper that is released the next day is when the story is told and if a reader has a reaction to the writing, they can write a letter to the editor which might take a week to actually reach the eyes of the author who in turn can choose to respond or not.  When I thought about these two forms of writing, I realized how similar they actually are from reading an article, responding to it, and hopefully getting a response. The only difference is speed.  The speed at which the article is read, responded to by the reader, and responded to by hundreds of other readers is extremely fast.  Although there are some differences between blog posts and newspaper articles, the point remains the same, to get the information to the readers and try to get them to react to it.  Blogging also brings an element of feeling into the writing.  Authors of articles may have opinions on certain stories they write and certain styles that come across in their writing but Sullivan argues that blogs contain a lot more emotion and more importantly constant emotion.  He talks about his personal experience during the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how he was blogging almost hourly about what had happened.  He writes in this article, “I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night.” that is the world of blogging, responding in real time with emotion and feeling. 

            Another article that I read made a very interesting point that I thought correlated well with what Sullivan was trying to argue.  In Andrea Lunsford’s Semi Illiterate Youth? Not so fast, Lunsford presents a study that she conducted at Stanford University that randomly asked 189 college students to submit anything that they had written whether it is in class or their own personal writing to Lunsford and her colleagues.  She stated that over the years they collected over 15,000 works of writing.  Her finding led her to the conclusion that Americans aren’t becoming more illiterate but rather they are developing new writing techniques and styles which are primarily occurring in new digital online formats.  These formats can consist of email, texts, Facebook, or even twitter.  All of these forms of writing are contributing to the enchantment of writing in young adults.  She gives an example where a student uses two different styles of writing to stat the same point, one very informal via text message and one very formal to a faculty advisor.  This shows that the dynamic of writing is changing but the skills to write formally are still being taught and learned and even new styles are emerging with the emergence of digital communication.  This study is great evidence for Sullivan’s article because he is basically arguing for the emergence of a new form of writing.  The study that was conducted by Lunsford shows compelling evidence that students are coming out with new forms of writing communication based on the multiple forms of writing that now exist and even the audience that the writing is trying to targets as Lunsford’s evidence shows. 

            After reading and writing about each of these articles I honestly didn’t know what to think.  I tend to disagree with Hedges’ statistics because I do not know what source these statistics are coming and after reading the rest of the articles by Carr, Sullivan, and Lunsford I frankly don’t believe much of anything that Hedges had to say.  I personally see Carr’s point in reading a book versus reading online where he talks about finding it hard to read a book cover to cover because all of his information is gathered in two or three sentence snippets online.  Even when reading his article I had trouble focusing what I was reading and tended to skim paragraphs to try and gather the important points.  I have found that after reading these articles and studying my own personal habits of reading and writing, I think that we are in fact becoming better more informed readers and writers.  Based on the evidence presented to me through these articles it is clear that we are becoming more personal with writing and that is what is making it better.  A perfect example of this what my senior year AP English class where at the end of the year we had to write a 1,500 word free form essay where we could write anything that we wanted and were even encouraged to use personal experiences and emotions.  After finishing the essay and receiving a final grade, my teacher told me that it was the best writing I had done all year.  I feel that this basically sums up the argument.  Technology and the digital age are affecting our writing but I argue that it is for the better, not for the worse.  Reading and writing are an ever evolving creation.  We have created writing in so many different forms since the first recorded writings in history and it will always be changing, no matter what people may think or say.