Scribner Lunsford

In the opening section of Scribner, Literacy as Adaptation, Scribner talks about how schools should at least be able to teach students how to communicate and function in their everyday life.  He says that there is no justification for why these skills are needed because it’s just so obvious.  When talking about literacy as power, Scribner uses a reference to Bataille in 1976 that talks about how literacy and words are a tool for human liberation and social change.  The third and final section that Scribner talks about how literacy is a state of grace.  He says that he doesn’t like to use grace as a term for the divine inference that it brings words and literacy have been used by Plato and Aristotle to reference specific philosophy and we still read and heed their advice today. One of my old history teachers said that there are good speakers and there are great speakers.  Good speakers inspire people but great speakers inspire people and move them to action.  Unfortunately one of the best examples of this is Adolf Hitler.  His speeches and words took Germany out of their depression after World War I and made them an economic powerhouse up until the end of World War II.  In Lunsford’s paper, she talks about how students haven’t necessarily become worse writers but have developed a different style of writing adding to their repertoire as she puts it.  These students still have the ability to write essays and literary works but in my opinion they just enjoy writing on the internet and expressing themselves in a new way.  I feel that these two articles are related to Hedges and Carr in the sense that they talk about appearances of our writing and reading today.  Hedges and Carr basically say that we are stupider than we used to be while Scribner and Lunsford argue that we are just changing the way that we talk and write.  Just because we don’t use big words like we did in the past to sound proper and elegant which frankly I don’t think people care about anymore.