Keiser University Grounds of Literacy Discussion

Respond To a Classmate’s Post

Classmate’s Post:

Part A:

In Lunsford’s essay “Our Semi-Literate Youth? Not So Fast”, she states that these changes alter the very grounds of literacy as the definition, nature, and scope of writing are all shifting away from the consumption of discourse to its production across a wide range of genres and media away from individual “authors” to participatory and collaborative partners-in-production, away from a single static standard of correctness to a situated understanding of audience and context and purpose for writing. Luckily, young people are changing as well, moving swiftly to join in this expanded culture of writing. They face huge challenges, of course—challenges of access and of learning ever new ways with words (and images). She gives an example of this in paragraph 7 by showing how students have the most errors in spelling, 25 years ago. Much less of a problem for writers. (We can chalk up that change, of course, to spell-checkers, which do a good job overall—but still can’t correct words that sound alike (to, too, two). But with technology, you win some and you lose some: the most frequent error in our recent study is “wrong word,” and ironically a good number of these wrong words come from advice given by the sometimes-not-so trusty spell-checkers.

Part B:

Using different technologies makes me feel comfortable when writing sometimes, only because I don’t go check behind myself when writing and some words are wrong. When I am texting from my phone, I’m very confident and know my words are correct because, if I spell something wrong its only cause I’m not paying attention while texting, the correct spelling always pops up top of writing bar. When I’m using Facebook, I have to be very careful with my spelling, it doesn’t show when a word is wrong. I always try to remember that the readers will notice if my writing isn’t correct.