rough draft for Thompson essay (part 1)

Analytical Response to Thompson’s “Public Thinking”

            Clive Thompson, author of “Public Thinking” has been a long time writer for the New York Times newspaper, and rightfully so. His diction exemplifies tremendous passion in his writing. One of his most famous works in which he demonstrates this is “Public Thinking”. Interestingly enough, in his earlier years, Thompson viewed the Internet and social media as an increasing downfall of society. To his surprise, he began to see only good coming from this launch into a new technological era. People were writing in large amounts like no one has ever seen before, not to mention the quality of writing due to “the audience effect” had also taken a turn for the best. These are just two of the positive attributes Thompson sees in online writing. His purpose for writing this essay is to demonstrate to the public a number of ways that writing online is actually increasing our literacy. He expresses himself so deeply, due to the fact that this topic is very controversial and people usually tend to lean more toward the use of technology and online writing being a detrimental thing to our society. Thompson uses a number of evidence to inform the reader every reason as to why this is a common misconception. In my analytical response to Thompson’s text, I will examine the different techniques he uses in his evidence to show just how effectively he explains and executes every piece of evidence he provides the reader.

Although abundant in Thompson’s reasons for his belief that America is increasingly becoming more literate, there are 3 main forms of evidence that are properly executed in order to support his case. An experimental study done by professor Brenna Clarke Gray illustrates the audience affect on her students by assigning them to create a Wikipedia entry on Canadian writers. After her study, Gray shared that her students did significantly better on this assignment than the others, primarily because they took it more seriously. She states, “It was like night and day” (56).  She uses night and day as opposites in an attempt to try and show her pathos to this study she conducted to instill within the reader just how successful and persuasive her study was. The fact that the idea of online prose is such an abundant way of writing to one’s highest potential as to use it in an academic study goes to show that this discovery is far from myth. However, to every study is a little error. And in the case of this example, it would have benefitted the reader vastly if this study were to have been replicated to individuals in the middle school age to see if age has a factor on the results.