As we each spend today celebrating the Internet's birthday in our own way, there are, no doubt, some who are cursing its birth. That bunch is lamenting what the Internet and technology has done to writing in our society. Well to that group, worry no more.
Stanford University professor Andrea Lunsford has organized the Stanford Study of Writing. Between 2001 and 2006 she collected almost 15,000 writing samples. That included everything from class assignments to chat sessions.
What she found was that technology is doing anything but killing our ability to write. Young people are doing more of it than ever and they are doing a good job of it too.
Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The folks at Wired did a good job of summarizing the findings here.
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