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We're In the Midst of a Literacy Revolution
Mike Sauter sends in a piece from Wired profiling research by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford, from which she concludes that we don't need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy. "[Lunsford] 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. 'I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization,' she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions."
she concludes that we don't need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy
lolwut? I c wut shee did thar. Were all loosing r minds, u no?
And dis is how people wil writ in da future.
"In bold new directions."
I've written and enjoyed reading more porn^w adult fiction than I ever have in school.
I M glad 2 c this iz happening. I wuz so verrrry conserned about teh litteracy levels in r schools.
Now wen pepl complain 2 me abt kitz not bein litterate, it will give me lolz, the suxors.
The Internet facilitates easy plagiarism. I assume papers for sale on the 'net generally have good grammar. Is it possible an increase in Internet plagiarism caused the increase in literary quality?
We certainly know no-child-left-behind did not help the early stages of the pipeline.
Just a thought...
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
tl;dr
I think that is what has been the definition of the modern society over the past four or five decades. We are no longer in a period where "revolutions" happen every so often, divided by long periods of stability. We are now in a period where the revolution is continual.
From material sciences to the internet revolution, we are seeing things happen on a monthly basis that have huge impacts on us. We are mostly numbed to this because we are used to seeing it. Yet go back three or four generations and look at how life was. Certainly nothing like today.
My mind still boggles at the fact that I can talk with people half way around the world without leaving my house. That I can collaborate with people with more ease than I would have been a decade ago who lived only fifty miles away. This ability to communicate easily, I think, is the foundation for all of the other revolutions we are seeing.
I wonder what this world will be like in fifty years. Will these revolutions help make this a much better place to live? Or will we find a way to fuck it up?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Why not study the "prose" of high-school students? Particularly the "prose" of the ever increasing number of high-school drop outs?
"Reviving [out ability to write]"? Yeah. And if I did a study that only looked at NASA engineers, I'd think we were all rocket scientists.
"has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like" I rest my case.
But you don't have to take my word for it!
"The show will cease airing on PBS on Friday, August 28, 2009 after 26 years on the air."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Rainbow
duh duh DUH!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
But... but... societal decline! The good ol' days! My generation and my recent ancestors' generations were the best, not like these spoiled rotten immoral kids! Everyone knows that Generation $NEWEST_BUZZWORD has been been corrupted by $NEWEST_MORAL_PANIC! This is obviously just some... some ivory tower elite INTELLECTUAL manipulating statistics (which every God-fearing American knows are less reliable than unexamined personal biases) to justify violence and sex in $NEW_MEDIA (which is much worse than the $OLD_MEDIA that I consume).
I found this interesting:
Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroomâ"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.
It makes a lot of sense. This idea of their being a golden age of people hand writing letters to each other is bullshit for the vast majority of the populace.
She might not be popular with some people in actually praising a new generation. I remember watching a discussion on some TV show once where a professor stated that in his experience the current young people were much more diligent and hard working than previous generations. It didn't go down well at all with the rest of the tut-tuting panel.
When on the one hand our letters are soon forgotten in the pile of loose papers including the stack of newspapers that we once subscribed to but never read and just folded in half and put into the corner to gather dust like the Jefferson memorial and on the other hand our personal correspondence in digital form lives forever on servers and hard drives and websites recording not only each worthless word but also each visit by us the authors as well as them the audience for seemingly ever until the password is forgotten or the account expires like our aforementioned newspaper subscription, we proud and vain humans find that having a little historical impact in our own way is better than nothing and are reacting as such.
Not that anyone cares what we are writing.
Well, considering how the vast majority of people today, at all social levels, are educated to one extent or another, even compared to a mere 100 years ago, it certainly is very impressive.
On the other hand, judging from the quality of writing I see online and work submitted by my own college students I beg to differ. But then, the more people we have going through the educational system the more likely the overall standard will decline somewhat.
One thing that is important is to remember that in nearly every generation for at least the last three hundred years there's been a tendency for a certain kind of comfortable intellectual to shake their heads and decry the downfall of civilization, the irreverence of youth and the death of literacy and wisdom. Noticing that trend does not necessarily make it incorrect, but it certainly makes it suspicious. I suspect it says more about a certain type of person than it does about our culture. With that said however, there is change going on, although unlike Dr Lunsford I think that any judgment of what is going on exactly is a bit premature: it's all guesswork right now. Her analysis isn't too bad, but it's not necessarily better than anyone else's guess. What Dr Lunsford has undertaken is very subjective, and it's almost impossible for her to get any kind of objective research or testable results. Given a century or two of distance and perspective that may become easier. (If we're still around then. ha)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can see why the Internet would have increased literacy in the short term. After all, it's still primarily a text-based medium, and so you need some level of reading and comprehension skill to be able to participate.
However, as the Internet moves more toward video, from youtube to video blogs to more and more stories on news sites being offered only as videos, will that jump in literacy be sustained? We're quickly moving from an Internet where large volumes of text were passed back and forth to an Internet where videos are passed around, and commentary on them is in the form of very brief twitter-length comments. So, I'm skeptical that people using the Internet in 10 years will be doing any more reading (or writing, for that matter) than people watching TV do now.
j/k
Actually, I think she's right in most ways. It's silly that people believe a technology whose use is based on the ability to write and comprehend written word would hurt literacy. Has it been changed? Absolutely. But I think it has evolved into a less 'fluffy' version.
In my last year of high school there was english lit and english tech. Lit was first and involved prose, allegories, 'What is the author really trying to say?', etc. Tech involved being as clear and concise as possible. Nothing fancy, just "Git 'er done". I think we're now where people are not interested in the fluff - show me what I need to know and let's carry on.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I am going to have to call BS on this one. Two things: 1. Just because all your friends speak the same level of garbage doesn't make you more "Literate." It just means everyone you know speaks like an idiot. It's great that you speak to your audiences level, now let's raise the caliber of that general level. 2. While studying editing for my Degree in Writing (Business and Technical) I had to edit a paper from an Honors level student. I couldn't even understand what point he was trying to make. So, what papers, and from what colleges/universities was she reviewing? I've seen some doozies even up to last month. It's hard to edit for grammar and not touch the content when the content is a turd.
I'm so awesome I don't need a sig file -Me
It's weird how communicating by reading and writing many more times over than we did during the 20th Century would have somehow made us better at it....
This sound familiar to the wonky research that was showcased a couple of weeks ago - that gamers are fat, depressed, and have an average age of 35. Data collection is everything. A sample of students taken only from Stanford, or Harvard, MIT, CalTech, is hardly representative of the nation as a whole. Those who get into these schools typically have SAT and ACT scores well above average - in both Math and English (viewing the demographics page at the study's homepage confirms this). In fact, if other research is to be believed, these are the types of people that are least likely to use Twitter, Facebook, etc excessively.
A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.
Unfortunately, when I go to the site, all of the pages under "methods" are giving me 404s.
I was happy to read this article. It reflects what has slowly become my perspective on online use of language.
Speaking as an immigrant who originally struggled with the English language for the first few years I spent in North America, I love English. I love how some parts make no sense, and how it's infused with slang from cultural experiences gathered from far and wide. Formal english is completely different from slang english, pigdin english, or online english... but I don't see the latter examples as _inferior_, simply different... wonderfully different.
People often confuse the notion of "writing English in a way that I can relate to" with "writing good English". This is not so. Language is most exciting when it is adulterated, compromised, and infused with the particulars of its speakers. I spent 3 years of adolescence in Louisiana, back in the 90s. While others were scoffing at the notion of ebonics, I was lapping up inner city slang: that beautiful, musical, profane prose. While others bemoan the so-called regression identified with online linguistic idioms, the 4-chanisms, and earlier the Jeff-K-isms, the flippant irreverence which with modern youth take ownership of their speech, I celebrate it.
Who wants to read things in the same way they've always written? Not to say that great writers of the past are stale - I still relish my Twain, Irving, Rushdie, and other masters of script - but I don't see the point in taking an adversarial perspective on the evolution of language.... and have no doubt, language IS evolving online. Literature is evolving online. The presentation is changing, the context is changing, the composition is changing, the references are changing... it's fucking exciting to watch.
-Laxitive
idk my bff jill
So, her sample of *Stanford* students says we're in a writing revolution eh? Since Stanford's $36,000 a year in tuition from the bank of mom and dad it stands to reason the kids entering the institution have been matriculated to a similar degree before entering Stanford.
Let's replicate her experiment in a State college and see what the outcome is eh?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I wonder then if the amount of drivel you see is more about the fact that the internet exposes what's there, rather than bringing the level down. The fact is that 50 years ago you wouldn't read something that wasn't written by someone who had specifically developed their literacy. I'm always surprised at how much more ignorant some of my relatives sound on Facebook than they ever did in person. My relatives closer to my own age, however, are very articulate online.
So the internet makes the world seem less literate (by exposing the lack of literacy that otherwise would never be seen), but in fact on average makes the world in fact more literate (by encouraging people to express themselves in words and thus get more practice doing so).
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
OMG WTF iz he tlkin about lolz :-D i can rite good 4 realz
OK, back to the real world...there's something a little fishy about this study. The article says that the study author surveyed academic papers, essays and class assignments for writing samples. That's a lot different from everyday communication -- you're writing in a formal style that is usually dictated to you by the assigning teacher/professor.
I'd love to see a study on corporate e-mail communications, or even written documentation. I admit that I'm getting older, but you can definitely tell a person's age from the formality level of their communications. People who are almost ready to retire remember writing memos by hand and physically mailing them or handing them to colleagues. For them, writing was something that required effort, and the content reflects this fact. Even e-mail messages are carefully crafted. People my age (mid-30s) grew up with written communication first, then e-mail shortly after. As a result, we tend to be less formal than the older crowd, but most of us still put some effort into writing coherent documents or messages. For example, it's normal for me to be brief in an e-mail message, but I would never let it go out without proofreading it for spelling, grammar and punctuation. The next generation grew up with e-mail first, then texting. The only "formal" writing most of them do seems to be in school. I'm mentoring a junior systems engineer right now, and trying to explain to him that you cannot send out messages or write documents with texting-speak or other problems in them. I can't tell you how many messages I have received from vendors that look like the author is talking to his friend on an iPhone. In my mind, it's not being an old fuddy-duddy to make yourself sound as polished as possible. You win more arguments than the lolspeak crowd if you can intelligently get your point across.
Damn kids. :-)
Seriously, lolspeak is fine for text messaging, but we should continue to teach formal writing techniques. Sure, the sky won't fall if everyone stops writing formal essays and moves towards a blogging format. However, the death of print journalism is really going to put a damper on news reporting, historical accounts, etc. In my mind, journalism is one of the things keeping traditional writing with the careful thought that goes along with it alive.
far more than we love hearing
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The headline failed to mention that the students in the analysis were all Stanford students, and the article buried that information in the middle. At first it states that the research was done at Stanford, and then reveals that the samples were all Stanford students.
Given that Stanford is a world class college institution, analyzing the progress of their writing is way too narrow of a sample size to say that all young people are improving their skills.
What about people who don't make in Stanford? What about the kids who don't make it to college? Are they a part of the writing revolution too? Or are they left behind while we make tantalizing headlines about the elite students of America? The article summary would lead you to believe that this revolution is about general literacy.
i sed tl;dr nt
I still remember arguing with a stubborn idiot who kept insisting operating systems are not computer applications. Guess he was one of those students, "pushing literacy in bold new directions".
While studying editing for my Degree in Writing (Business and Technical) I had to edit a paper from an Honors level student.
What, there are universities that hand out degrees in "Writing (Business and Technical)"? I'm less worried about students' alleged illiteracy than I am about universities' lack of ambition. [sepia]Back in my day you'd study business or technology and get your writing practice while drafting your term papers.[/sepia]
My own students sometimes write swathes of immaculate prose. These swathes come without the Google ads and other distractions that accompany the exact same swathes that Google obligingly finds for me. Definitive proof of plagiarism is blessedly simple.
text-speak and ebonics are not "bold new directions", they are corruptions of the language.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Agreed. More communication is generally good. But there are a few major problems. For one, the signal-to-noise ratio has increased massively. Granted, an old-style letter had pretty poor latency and round-trip times. However, a hand-written letter between penpals or lovers about everything of import that happened in the last two months is, in some ways, a LOT more efficient than a thousand tweets about coffee and confusion and "wtf? moments" and stress, with only one huge and easily missed insight into your current project buried amongst it.
Literacy, the ability to both read and write, is an important part of interactivity. If you want to take part in that interactivity, you need to be able to read and write...you don't have to do it well, but you need a certain proficiency in it , and that is what this new literacy revolution is based upon.
Literacy is not about *correctly* writing, but about both reading and writing. If you look back at how people thought things would come out in the '60s and '70s, they were talking about a coming "Post Literate" world, dominated by the TV. Instead we see the popularity of TV in freefall with a dramatically splintered audience. People are spending more time on interactive computer based games, in "chat", or surfing the net than they do watching tv. The biggest difference between the TV world of the future that never was and our reality is that we don't allow the TV, in any form, to passively feed us information. Harlan Ellison called it the Glass Teat. Thankfully, we live in a different reality.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
These kids today, they sure do know their Greek alpha-bit much better than their parents ever did. I'd image if you ask any 12 year old boy to draw the lambda symbol they would probably have little trouble...
Damn you computer games... STOP teaching your children the Ancient Greek Alpha-bit... I mean whats next? Games that teach them to interact with others for the common good of the group? Pfft....
I remember my freshman English teacher (this was 1994). One day she was talking about the importance of knowing how to write, and she pointed to the Mac Classic in the corner and said 'Because the future is in that box!" She was really, really right. I spend most of my day writing emails to clarify ideas for other people, and that ultimatly is what pushes projects ahead. You simply need to have a descent understanding of how to write in order to function well online.
A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.
Don't forget to sample those who don't attend traditional universities at all. Vocational schools and trade apprenticeships are less used than in the past, but they haven't disappeared by any means.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The web might be becoming "video heavy" now, but being able to create video isn't such a specialized skill anymore like it was when television was introduced and video creation needed a score of trained engineers and huge equipment to make it work technically. (Didn't writing go through a similar stage as well?) As equipment and needed know decreases video becomes an experience where normal people become producers and not just passive spectators.
Creating video could become a lot like writing is in schools sometimes and be a way for the creator to learn. The output could be crap with no audience at all outside of a grader, but the person creating the work actually learned something by doing it and furthered his or her knowledge and education.
The garbage I read from younger co-workers in the office certainly doesn't demonstrate this. 1/3 of it is simply embarrassing.
"The batter pushes currency through the wire." ... even with spellcheck my students manage to sound like dipshits (college EM lab)
That or the student just had professional baseball on the brain. Signing players who can consistently score hits and win games sells tickets and pushes currency through the wire to your team's bank account.
The people that go to large public universities also have SAT and ACT scores that are well above average.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
there is a difference between literacy, period, and literacy in a specific historical vernacular
how people talked and wrote in 1980 is not how they talked and wrote in 1940 and not how they talked and wrote in 1900, ad nauseum
the guy who grew up expecting 1940 vernacular to be equivalent to the concept of "literacy" would lament this slangy derivative vernacular of 1980, when in fact, how people talk and write in 1980 is no better or worse than 1940. the problem is in how certain brittle and shortsighted minds define what "literacy" means
the internet and cell phone technologies will dramatically impact how english is written and spoken, most definitely. but as long as people are communicating coherently, who fucking cares?
at one time, such fragile minds bemoaned the loss of the latin language in scholastic curricula, that it would result in a nation of idiots and simpletons. so apparently all of you who don't know how to conjugate verbs in latin are illiterate simpletons. really? that's a valid criteria?
so then why can't some of you see that some of the criteria some of you use to draw the line between literate and illiterate is equally random and meaningless. real literacy is about effective and coherent communucation. full stop
perhaps, what people use to signify what "literacy" means in their minds are using signs and customs that are random and pointless, just so much useless and pointless flotsam and jetsam of the mind, more signifying of the lack of flexibility of the mind's of those crying "illiteracy" than any real illiteracy going on in the real world. random cultural detritus, linguistic mannerisms of a particular time period or geographical location have zero value in a drawing up a definition of the concept of literacy
for example, this entire post used no capital letters. what exactly is the fucking purpose of capital letters anyway? a whole second alphabet for the sake of the redundant communication of what punctuation marks take care of already?
so when SMS TXT speak "infects" the english language, the english language is not suffering. literacy rates are not falling. its simple inevitable linguistic evolution, and it consists of getting rid of pointless redundant cruft no one needs to communicate effectively anyways, but certain brittle minds latch onto as a fall in "literacy". fucking bullshit. develop some mental flexibility please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From TFA:
"The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade."
Simple solution: have the entire class grade each paper, and use that "class grade" to substantially weight the final grade as given by the professor.
Would doubtless put a quick brake on lazy or plagiaristic writing, too, since in the way of such an audience, any such flaw will be seized upon and flayed without mercy.
The downside? Pretty soon no one would write a paper that didn't substantially conform to the current class groupthink, lest they be flayed in public. Sometimes there are reasons why your grade comes from a professor and not your peers.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Bah, it's only a matter of time before they hear some crap from a friend at school, disable Google safe search, and find lots of porn. My kids forced me to put Netnanny on cause it was the only way to monitor their usage at all hours (other trade off is very limited Internet time when I'm able to monitor -- too difficult in this situation). Just be prepared for it.
-l
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Honestly, this is already happening.
When I was in high school (not all that long ago), we had to write and perform skits on occasion. Now, I am watching (and occasionally being an extra in) videos my younger brother is putting together on the same subjects.
Where my classmates and I acted out a commercial for a breakfast cereal in Spanish, my brother and his friends borrow a video camera from an unwitting parent, create props and costumes (99 cent store!), and drive around town to film at the beach or in the park or whereever. They made a commerical for a Spanish-language car dealership, complete with LLAME AHORA in huge letters across the bottom of the screen. They also filmed a music video based on the Vietnam war that made several of our relatives cry.
They're not just learning Spanish and History and how to write a script, they're learning how to use a video camera, how to use video editing software, how to do special effects with strings and miniatures and perspective shots, and even some basic CG work.
Unfortunately, none of them have yet learned to act.
I completely disagree. It seems most people, especailly teens are insultingly bad at grammar and spelling.
For example, the usage of "they're", "there" and "their" is more often wrong than right and are commonly used interchangeably.
There might be some validity to this study if my daughter is any indication.
The study definitely nailed one point -- prior to the Internet, most people never wrote anything substantial outside of school. And even that was minimal and done with great reluctance. I remember one instance in particular while in High School (pre-Internet). We were tasked with writing a short story. It needed to be at least 500 words. I've never really needed an excuse to write so I whipped up a couple thousand word horror story and that was that. I was shocked, though, at the other submissions. Nearly every other classmate struggled to hit the 500 word mark and used every trick in the book to get there. Many couldn't even do that and complained about how hard it was to even commit 200 words to their story.
That was the case throughout my High School years. Nobody would write anything unless ordered to and, even then, would do the absolute bare minimum.
Fast forward (many years) to today. My daughter is a typical "tween". Her texts and IMs and email messages are all "UR sooooo cool!!! LOL" and the like. If you were to concentrate on just that, then you would be justified in complaining about the downfall of literacy. But you would be wrong. That's just one aspect of her writing.
See, she also writes books. Not just "stories" and certainly not because she was ordered to in class. She finished her first book when she was 10 years old. It was 500 pages. Not 500 words... 500 PAGES long. Her subsequent stories have been similar.
Now I'm not saying that the books are ready for public consumption but just the fact that she writes so much at her age is amazing. Part of it is that she is "gifted" in that area... but I'm convinced that part of it is just because she has been writing in other mediums for so long that it's become second nature to her.
Unfortunately, when I go to the site, all of the pages under "methods" are giving me 404s.
who cares about the methodology? as long as the results is something you can show in the face of anyone telling you that your english sucks because of the internet so that you can shut him up!
she concludes that we don't need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy
Right now, text is a major part of the user interface with computers and the Internet. That is likely to change. Audio and video are increasingly becoming part of the web and replacing content that would otherwise have been text. This trend will only increase with the increasing availability of broadband. We're already seeing people blog by sitting in front of a webcam and posting the video to youtube. Voice recognition will probably reach a point where it becomes the primary means of giving commands to a computer and becomes the main method of data entry. Text-to-voice is getting better all the time and will eventually be as good or better than having someone read to you. When these things happen, it will be the end of our current golden age of literacy. It will become easier then ever to function without being able to read.
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.
Yeah. They're not getting more literate, they're getting more social, and now they do it through text.
At the same time, their skills in critical analysis, understanding complex texts, understanding polycausality, comprehending depth of meaning, and other important things -- if you want a higher civilization -- have gone out the window.
Lunsford knew she'd make headlines and advance her own career, so you get this happy smoke up the fundament story. Ignore it.
Futurist Traditionalism
OK, so literacy isn't declining according to some. They are clearly out of touch with reality. Literacy has two faces: the ability to read and the ability to write. In both comprehension is key.
If the reader can't understand what has been written previously, communications have failed. Most documents written before 1950 are going to be nearly incomprehensible to young adults today. They aren't going to see the point of trying to read materials like this.
Similarly, when a writer cannot communicate their thoughts in a clear way, communications have failed. Taking the writings of your average 22 year old today and giving them to someone in theor 50's to read will most likely result in utter lack of comprehension. It isn't that the subject being written about is foreign to the reader, it is that the young person is likely to use contractions, abbreviations and slang terms that are only accessible to other people of their generation.
Obviously this leads to situations where a new person in a company can't seem to communicate with the president of the company. It also leads to things like marketing not being able to communicate with accounting. Worse yet, it leads to the son-in-law not being able to make himself understood to the wife's father. This isn't the first time this has happened, and the results aren't pretty.
Schools have done a pretty good job of convincing young people that learning is pointless and that history before 1990 is useless to them. We are supposedly living in some new time completely unlike anything that has come before, so there is no point to looking back. This is so utterly wrong that it is comical. Unfortunately, it is how people are thinking today. This explains many trends in today's society where we are clearly repeating the bad mistakes from earlier times.
Sure, maybe technology has changed how some things are done. But it hasn't changed human nature at all. We're still the same humans no matter how much we wish we were not.
Literacy revolution?! When ever I read the weekly course work of my students I am surprised how low their English lanuage knowledge is. Despite me being a foreigner and them being mainly English native speakers... So much about a literacy revolution!
no no no, all that's happened is the internet makes plagerism much easier.
the only people who seem to have a problem with me not using capital letters generally consist of those with brittle minds whom i detest to begin with
my lack of capital letters repulses certain minds, they have difficulty reading what i say, and so they go away. but anyone with what i consider to be a standard flexibility of mind has no problem with the lack of capitals, never even mentioning it
so its win/win: brittle minds are repulsed by me, and i don't have to deal with their lack of mental wattage
if lack of capital letters creates that much static in your mind when reading these words, there's something wrong with you, i really believe that. a certain inability to deal with or handle novelty... and perhaps novel thought
i don't think this mental inflexibility extends to ideology, as there's plenty of really stupid liberals i really don't want to talk to, and there's plenty of intelligent conservatives i strongly to desire honest debate with. neither conservatism or liberalism has a monopoly on stupidity, so in the end lack of capitalization is really nothing more than an iq filter for me, not an ideology filter
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"which were obviously unavailable to those of us who used dip-pens and inkwells."
Back in the day when that was the normal mode of writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar was a lot less consistent then people seem to remember.
I do believe we need another type of punctuation to support a new type of common sentence. For more details, see Sig.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A more comprehensive study would grab a frequency weighted sample that looked at a larger number of students at large public universities, as well as a significant number of students from community colleges.
Unfortunately, when I go to the site, all of the pages under "methods" are giving me 404s.
So, your concern is that this study may not cover what YOU think it ought to be about?
Perhaps technology helps us to take literacy to the next level but handwriting of many tech-savvy teens sucks nowadays. Do they not teach cursive in schools any more?
Also, I think chat logs can not serve as evidence. Just as spoken language differs greatly depending on who you are talking to, the purpose of communication has a big influence on the level you are using to bring your thoughts across. You seldom chat with your superior. You usually chat with peers. Few of us would use the same phrases, figures of speech and abbreviations in a professional document, yet most of us have at one point used such language, to a degree.
OMG, so true. There's a theater company in New York that specializes in converting long, rambling telephone conversations into dramatic theater. The actors use ipods to stay in sync with the dialog, and the performances are hilarious. There's a lot of "yeah, um" and "so then I, no, wait" and so on.
If you really listen to yourself or others talk, casually, you'll realize just how much verbal communication is about context and expression, and how little syntax and the actual meaning of words plays into it.
There's a reason why we don't let people with PhD's in Rhetoric publish statistical studies. They think that 15,000 writing samples from Stanford students can be extrapolated to the US population.
While there is a lot more video available on the internet, I don't think watching those videos is replacing time internet users spend reading and writing; it's replacing the time those internet users spend watching TV.
As long as the primary interface for using a computer is a keyboard, the internet will be dominated by reading and writing.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I would suggest that the real revolution is in idiocy. The masses in the US have gotten dumber and dumber and stranger and stranger for quite a few decades. When high school students in New Jersey can not identify the ocean that touches their shores can there be any hope of literacy? I knew one boy in the tenth grade who thought he was taking a class in psychology. In fact the course was in physiology. Go out in the street and ask people "Who was Samuel Johnson?" or "Who was Richard Savage?" and see what king of answers you get. Then throw out a curve ball and ask them to contrast the philosophy of Richard Wagner with that of John Paul Sartre for a real howl. Then ask them to name three famous authors from France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and China. You may begin to feel that even among college graduates literacy is absent or badly wounded.
wait a minute: are you saying that a more effective spell and grammar check than MS word is snark?
"A sample of students taken only from Stanford, or Harvard, MIT, CalTech, is hardly representative of the nation as a whole. Those who get into these schools typically have SAT and ACT scores well above average - in both Math and English (viewing the demographics page at the study's homepage [stanford.edu] confirms this). In fact, if other research is to be believed, these are the types of people that are least likely to use Twitter, Facebook, etc excessively."
Really? I wonder how they determined that. Of all the people I know that are not specifically in a technical field or serious computer enthusiasts, it is the set of people from schools like Harvard and the like that are the *most* likely to spend lots of time on these types of sites.
Of course, their updates and posts *are* often more literate than average, but I would say if anything they spend more time involved in using social networking sites than other people I know.
To sum up that debate: On the internet "who" is generally used by a writer making an honest attempt to communicate. "Whom" is used mostly by people who didn't like the first writer's point of view but cannot articulate a real rebuttal, in an attempt to steer further discussion into futile grammar pedantry.
0 1 - just my two bits
Assimilating (the majority of) the text available on the internet and phones and calling it "reading" is like hearing a passerby whistling a tune and calling it "listening to a symphony".
Your numbers are way off for the early 1900s. Russia: closer to 88 million million
United Kingdom: 41 million
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
So what's the big fucking deal? A lot of "grammar rules" are arrogant, ignorant bullshit, so if most people just ignore most of that stuff it's really no loss. And a lot of otherwise smart people just can't spell very well. But if they had to improve at only one thing, which of these would you prefer?
There are writing skills that are a lot more important than spelling and your so-called prescriptive "grammar," period.
Are you adequate?
young padawan.
(+1, Disagree)
Homophones are really not a big deal. Language is always rife with potential ambiguity that gets resolved in context. If we wrote "affect" and "effect" in the same way, that would be no worse than writing "bank" and "bank" the same way--which we already do.
Or, since you speak Spanish, here's an amusing example: due to the fact that words in Spanish cannot start with sc- Spanish, the Spanish word escatológico corresponds to two distinct words in English: eschatological and scatological, which have very different meanings. Somehow, Spanish speakers manage to distinguish nearly all the time when the word is being used to refer to the afterlife, and when it is used to refer to excrement.
No, I just don't agree. Armonizado vs. atenuado, entonar vs. intimar. Your English examples are all Latinate, you know, and most English speakers would not use most of them in ordinary conversation (except perhaps "attuned").
Are you adequate?
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The big issue that descriptive approaches to language always try to correct is that the prescriptivists are always falsely cloaking themselves in the mantle of "logic." Prescriptivists will demand that you submit your writing to absurd rules ("never end a sentence with a preposition," "never split an infiniive") that they claim are "logical"; and therefore, they insist that if others' writing doesn't meet their own pet rules, the writer is illogical, ignorant or worse. These folks, however, almost always got off the grammar train back about 1850, and really don't know anything about grammar properly said.
Banishing prescriptivism from grammar doesn't mean that anybody is entitled to talk write however the hell they want in every context. How people talk and write is still subject to all forms of social approval, and people constantly attempt choose a way of writing and talking that is appropriate for presenting a certain image of themselves to their audiences. I.e., a lot of what people ordinarily call "grammar" is really style, a way of choosing linguistic variants to convey implicit messages about oneself and one's social standing.
The thing is that "good grammar" in the prescriptivist sense is just one more style among others in our society. It's a style that is associated with educated upper-middle class white-collar professionals, especially those whose professions most heavily involve writing (journalists, marketers, writers). "Good grammar" is thus, really, an in-group marker, just like business suits or low baggy jeans. Criticizing another person's "bad grammar" is an indirect way of portraying that person as an outsider to the group.
Now, having laid the ground, let me respond more specifically:
What this amounts to is that there should be one and only one linguistic style that everybody should conform to, which spells words in one particular way. Why?
The best answer is probably along the lines of this: "because people who have power over you will tend to discount you if you do not"; people who are looking for an educated, intelligent employee, for example, will not hire you if you fail too crassly to display the linguistic marks of one, just like they might not hire you if you come to your job interview wearing shorts and a wife-beater. There's no more to it.
Are you adequate?
Pardon me, but it's "whom" (you accuse of bigotry,) not "who". You should try mumbling that with your foot OUT of your mouth.
At the risk of coming off as a jerk, I'll say you seem to me to be the auto mechanic trying to use the nearest S.A.E. equivalent to the correct sized metric wrench. While you're not trying to change the oil filter with a hammer, it nevertheless does put you in less of a position to criticize. Remember, there is always someone who knows more about grammar and spelling than you do. Also, while you're condemning people with smaller vocabularies as "inferior", I would like to point out that having a large vocabulary full of words that you don't QUITE know how to use, is almost as bad. The word "dumb" is not the same as "stupid", stupid. Look it up.
Finally, please consider refraining from judging the intellect of others upon the single criterion of sophistication in communicative technique. Knowing how to say something 10 different ways doesn't make you smarter or better than someone who only knows one way to say it, provided he or she knows the proper time and place to say it.
Sir, you have arrived for a battle of wits, unarmed. ~Franklin
I think this youtube video is highly relevant (no, it's not a rickroll): WWII Pilots - Armstrong, Miller, Mitchell & Webb. It takes a typical RAF scene, but there is something modern about the language of 2 of the pilots. Watch it, it's well worth it.
The point? Literacy may be on the up, but precise modes of expression are falling by the wayside. You only have to read a few books written a hundred years ago and today about characters in similar classes and situations to tell.
lol. Technology is improving our literary abilities?
Tell that to Shakespeare. He'll roll in his grave.
I submit my post as exhibit A.
No really, we write more because we can feed more literature to our computer, and the submit and send buttons just eat it. Be it rants in emails, time wasting posts on forums, or publishing a blog no one looks at, there is so much more to writing to throw around and that sticks to more and more places.
And twitter is making us all poets. Not really, but I'm trying to see positive.
Ah yes, it's not killing literacy as long as we redefine the term. We'll just call the complete lack of punctuation, grammar, syntax, etc a "bold new direction" and that'll make everything ok. Because, people are at least "writing" you know.
Seriously, I read what 1st years write in there assignments and a lot of the time, I can't comprehend what they're trying to say. It could almost be a string of random words for all that is communicated. I've also seen this problem progress a great deal over the past decade. It's a real problem, it's getting worse and crack-pottery like this nonsensical project are just attempts at justifying student stupidity.
We really really *really* need to get the primary and secondary school teachers to actually teach again. Otherwise, we're screwed.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
There's something about that phrase that seems incongruous in this context, but somehow I just can't figure out what it is...
(P.S.: For the record, I agree with you.)
Unfortunately, when I go to the site, all of the pages under "methods" are giving me 404s.
Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?"
Willard: "I don't see any method at all, sir."
"project called the Stanford Study of Writing",
that is "Study of Writing in Stanford".
Nice to hear personal tech is good for Stanford,
keep in mind: the country, in large, is illiterate.