tehcnology doesnt effect my writing, rite?

Clive Thompson wrote an article describing how he felt that the "New Literacy" that was up and coming in this generation was not as detrimental as many think it is. Most people believe that in this generation, my generation, technology is taking over how we write and communicate with each other. One John Sutherland describes our writing as, "bleak, bald, sad shorthand." I could not disagree more with Sutherland's accusations.

I know that these accusations are false. I am a teenager/young adult who grew up in the age of technology and instant messaging. I never once used “txt” language in a formal writing for school. Once I moved past the 6th grade, I never even used “txt” language to begin with. Not on instant messaging, not on Facebook, or anything like that. I feel that it looks extremely sloppy and lazy, as well as it shows that you have no patience to write out a full word. If you are too lazy to write out the word “you” and instead resort to “u”, you need some serious motivation because that is only two extra letters you need to type. I believe that technology may have only made us smarter in the sense that we are now exposed to more writing and rhetoric than ever before. We have a spell-check in Word which helps us remember how to correctly spell words, we have all of these online articles being published by professionals who know what they are doing so we are exposed to how they write, which is always correct. It is simply a stage of life that most kids go through around 5th-6th-7th grade. They get lazy and think they are cool when they type “how r u” or “nmjc” instead of “hey how’s it going?” or “I’m good man, how about you?” Once they move on from that stage, usually by high school, they realize how stupid it looks and how immature they sounded. I would know, because I was one of those kids.

The claims that Thompson is making are quite accurate in my opinion. Thompson argues that technology is helping kids these days to write better and more often. In earlier generations, you would never see people writing other than for school or if it was their profession. Nowadays, you see people writing in blogs such as these, or just for recreation. They write for an audience which can play a very pivotal part in their writings. One thing I know for sure is that Mr. Sutherland could not be more wrong on this one.