This is in'eresting: Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Oh, gronk. This is me this morning.

Just to get the three hours of sleep I got, I had to shut the cat out of the bedroom (she was very meow-y last night, except for the time when she was sleeping and I was reading). When I finally woke up and opened the door to go to the bathroom, she came darting in like she'd been waiting out there the entire time.

Speaking of the cat, I think summer might be over. Amarna never sleeps on my bed during the summer--from May through (usually) mid-September, she'll join me for snuggles and petting, but she'll sleep on the floor. Even if we have a cool spell in July, she won't fall asleep while I'm on the bed. But last night, she was snoozing away on her corner of the bed.

Puppies Dressed As Cats: The Best Thing Ever? (VIDEO, POLL)

Conan gave the world a present last night, a "mini dose of joy" as he call it, in the form of puppies dressed as cats. While the theme song made us want to kill ourselves, the puppies themselves were amazing!

Ugh. Car got broken into. Here's a PSA: thieves who see the GPS mount will break into a 10-year-old Honda for the GPS in the glove box. Now you know! Off to the police station!

My coworkers got burgers for lunch and now I'm jealous. Ah well.

Oh, bon bon, that really sucks. Here's hoping they didn't do too much damage to the car.

I was going to ask my boss if I could take a half-day off this afternoon, but she sent out an e-mail saying she was taking the afternoon off, so I'm SOL. Oh, well, I'll see if I can maybe get next Friday off and give myself a four-day weekend. I've still got nine days of unscheduled PTO that I have to use up this year, in addition to the week I'm planning on taking at the end of October.

I wish I knew how much PTO I have. I asked the newish 2nd person in HR the other day, and she told me that she won't be able to tell me until the other HR person gets back from vacation next week.

Seriously.

Really? That's weird (ETA: that she wouldn't know how to find it out herself).

My company has their payroll forms online--I just have to fill it out every week with any OT (it's never approved anyway, so the rare instance where I stay late, I take comp time instead) and PTO hours and submit it before I leave on Friday. As soon as I hit "submit," it automatically recalculates my remaining PTO for the year.

I have no idea -- we submit leave requests on line, but I think they are actually tracked through our Excel timesheets? Or some shit? It's truly a mystery. Luckily, I get a ton of vacation time and never take it all, but I would still like to know!

PTO ought to be tracked with payroll and on your paycheck. But it sometimes winds up under HR's purview (since it's a benefit) and then somebody's probably got to make a manual calculation on some outmoded system.

signed,
That's What I Used To Do