172 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiSwriting,” Mr. Grabill says. “People write more now
than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have
to write.”
Kathleen Blake yancey, a professor of english at
Florida State university and a former president of
the National Council of Teachers of english, calls the
current period “the age of composition” because, she
says, new technologies are driving a greater number
of people to compose with words and other media
than ever before.
“This is a new kind of composing because it’s so
variegated and because it’s so intentionally social,”
Ms. yancey says. Although universities may not con-
sider social communication as proper writing, it still
has a strong influence on how students learn to write,
she says. “We ignore it at our own peril.”
But some scholars argue that students shoul d adapt
their writing habits to their college course work, not
the other way around. Mark Bauerlein, a professor
of english at emory university, cites the reading and
writing scores in the National Assessment of educa-
tional Progress, which have remained fairly flat for
decades. It is a paradox, he says: “Why is it that with
young people reading and writing more words than
ever before in human history, we find no gains in read-
ing and writing scores?”The Right Writing
Determining how students develop as writers, and
why they improve or not, is difficult. Analyzing a large
enough sample of students to reach general conclu-
sions about how the spread of new technologies
affects the writing process, scholars say, is a monu-
mental challenge.
The sheer amount of information that is relevant to
a student’s writing development is daunting and diffi-
cult to collect: formal and informal writing, scraps of
notes and diagrams, personal histories, and fleeting
conversations and thoughts that never make it onto
the printed page.Keller adds the voices
of scholars of writing
to comment on the
value of new media.910111213Unlike Thompson and
Haven, Keller provides
the counterargu-
ments of scholars
who dispute the find-
ings of the Stanford
study.07_GRE_5344_Ch7_151_210.indd 172 11/19/14 1:59 PM