"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization"

Technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

One of those ‘everything bad is actually good for you!’ romps, but bear with me here.

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.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. 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 fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

See, here is a thought I have had: local television news anchors and other stupid old fucks are always carrying on about SMS-speak and ‘a/s/l’ chat shorthand, but internet-folk show a pretty keen awareness for language and the correct application thereof. Many viral memes—from All Your Base to Lolcats to How is babby formed?????—are, at their core, jokes based on grammar. The internet excels at highlighting and ridiculing bad examples like these, and I think we (often) hold ourselves to higher standards because of it.

There are contradictory examples, of course, but who cares about mouth-breathing MySpace tweens or Cute Overload-commenting spinsters? I think the core argument is rock-solid. We are all writing more than we would have without these glowing rectangles in front of our faces, and we’re doing it with higher ambitions than those soon-to-die generations give us credit for.

Learn to type faster, Grandpa.