Turning My Word Upside Down

In the literary community today there is a great surge in the amount of writing done by young scholars. However, it is not in the form of great academic prose as you would expect, it comes in a much more dumbed-down version know as social communication. Facebook, MySpace, and text messaging are all involved in this revolution, but it is not the kind of writing young students need. In these formats, there is no need for a wide vocabulary, simple acronyms and numbers will do, and most writing involves no more than a few sentences. While I can say that any writing is good writing, students need much less of this. There is no need for research or time spent delved into books searching for answers, people can simply write what they feel or how they are laughing about something. Also, the fact that this form of literacy is so short can easily influence the newer generation to try to get a point across in less and less words. Long down the road, research projects could become mere sentences long, and contain very few bits of information, unlike those enormous projects of the past. Students could miss bits of information in their readings by only skimming articles, leaving out critical details. There is no doubt that getting younger people to write is a very good thing, just not in this form. Blogs can still be great tools for literacy, if they are used in the right fashion. If not, we are only throwing away the great literacy levels we strove so hard for in the past.
In this post I countered a past article about how I thought the new age of writing was a good thing for literacy. While I truly do believe that this new writing is a good thing, I chose to counter this post because my opinion was so strongly held. I tried to use all three forms of countering, but I put my main emphasis on dissenting from the article. I looked for limits in some of the points I made, and exposed them in the best fashion I thought possible. I truly do believe that the new age of literacy is a great thing, and I have to admit I felt like I was siding very strongly with Hedges while writing this.