Essay Intro/1st Body Paragraph Draft

Ally Ferrell

Professor Werry

RWS 100

September 8, 2014

Intro Paragraph/First Body Paragraph

    Ally Ferrell

Professor Werry

RWS 100

September 8, 2014

Intro Paragraph/1st Body paragraph

With the increasing prominence of technology in the past few decades, the internet has become just as much of a writing tool as a pencil and paper are. The real question here though is, is this tool actually improving writing? Many researchers have shown that this generation has better writing skills than ever. One of these researchers is Clive Thompson, who has been fascinated with technology since he was just a kid. Thompson studied poetry and political science at the University of Toronto and has been a long-time writer for the New York Times Magazine. He explains in his essay, "Public Thinking", from his book, Smarter Than You Think, that the internet is absolutely responsible for this general increase in writing ability.  He claims that the internet is responsible for a change in cognitive behavior. He supports this by bringing up statistics, personal experiences, and examples of other people. In this paper, I will analyze Thompson’s main arguments and how he goes about supporting them. In addition to examining his good arguments, I will also examine his weak points and where he could have improved his 

support.

Walking aroung an average college campus, one see’s almost everyone on his or her phone texting, tweeting, or emailing. Clive Thompson says that these things add up. Thompson’s first supporting claim is that the internet, and technology in general, has caused people to write more than any generation has before. And of course, with practice comes more skill. Briefly, he explains that “the internet has produced a foaming Niagra of writing”(46). He uses the word ‘Niagra’ because it is one of the most well-known and largest waterfalls with extreme power and force. In order to help the reader grasp how much the internet has increased our writing, he reports some shocking statistics:

               Each day, we compose 154 billion emails, more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, and over 1 million blog post and 1.3               

million blog comments on WordPress alone. On Facebook, we write about 16 billion words per day. That’s just in the United States: in China, it’s 100 million updates each day on Sina Wiebo, the country’s most popular microblogging tool, and millions more on social networks in other languages worldwide, including Russia’s VK. Text messages are terse, but globally they’re our most frequent piece of writing: 12 billion per day(47).

Thompson uses this evidence to cause the reader to realize how much we really write. He uses examples that his readers will likely relate to; so rather than saying how many books are written in a year, he estimates how many tweets are written in a day. However, Thompson does not give a source to where he found these numbers, which makes this evidence less credible and makes the argument weaker. He says that he calculated these numbers himself, but him being a poetry major does not convince me that these are accurate statistics.