170 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiS“College writers need to be able to retain the best
of print literacy, and know how to deploy it for their
own purposes,” said Lunsford. “They also need and
deserve to be exposed to new forms of expression.”
With the more playful, inventive and spontaneous
forms of writing available to them, are today’s stu-
dents losing the taste for more complex english?
“every time I pick up Henry James, I have to
relearn how to read Henry James. We don’t want to
lose the ability to do that kind of reading and writ-
ing,” said Lunsford.
“Thinking about hard things requires hard prose.
We can boil things down, prepare for different audi-
ences, but when it comes to hard things, I don’t think
it can be worked out in 140 characters.”Concludes with a
quotation about how
the use of new media
does not devalue tra-
ditional conceptions
of literacy, writing,
and classic literature.studies explore Whether the internet makes
students Better WritersJosh Keller was a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education in Wash-
ington, D.C. The weekly publication focuses on issues in higher educa-
tion and on news and serves as a job-information source for college and
university faculty members, administrators, and students. His piece
appeared in 2009.
■ ■ ■JOsh KeLLeRA
s a student at Stanford university, Mark Otuteye
wrote in any medium he could find. He wrote blog
posts, slam poetry, to-do lists, teaching guides, e-mail
and Facebook messages, diary entries, short stories. He
wrote a poem in computer code, and he wrote a com-
puter program that helped him catalog all the things he
had written.
But Mr. Otuteye hated writing academic papers.
Although he had vague dreams of becoming an en -
glish professor, he saw academic writing as a “soul-
less exercise” that felt like “jumping through hoops.”
When given a writing assignment in class, he says, heKeller uses the same
student example as
Haven to make the
same point about
college writing
assignments.303132331207_GRE_5344_Ch7_151_210.indd 170 11/19/14 1:59 PM