Laurie's post on bad writing by students wisely cautions against what we might call the nostalgic impulse, that is, the tendency of people to regard everything as heading downward.  It afflicts people middle-age and older, and conservatives, too.  One of the mottos of conservatism is a statement I've seen attributed to Lord Palmerston at the height of Victorian reform: "Change, change, change--all this talk about change--aren't things bad enough already?"

And so, those folks who think student writing keeps getting worse need to check their pessimism for evidence.

But there is another impulse to be identified as well.  It's the opposite one, the "progress" belief, in its extreme form, the claim of "revolution."  We see it in the quotation from Andrea Lunsford: "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." 

Think about the grand significance of that assertion, and carry out the analogy.  What does it say about people before the Digital Age arrived?

Nonetheless, you hear it a lot in technology discussions.  When Time magazine named "You" the Person of the Year in 2006, it did so because Web 2.0 empowers everyone to be a writer, photographer, reporter, filmmaker, collaborator ..., and Time's Lev Grossman concluded, "it's really a revolution."  Educator Will Richardson says that the "Read/Write Web" is "rewriting the age old paradigms of how things work."  The inventor of the computer mouse, Douglas Englebart once stated that "the digital revoluton is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing."

Many of those claims have exploded, for instance, all the talk we heard in the early-00s about how multitasking was an advance beyond linear thinking.  But the revolutionary claims find other outlets, such as Twitter activity in Iran, and, at Stanford, the claims about new writing literacies.

Here's the thing. Laurie correctly states that "young people today write far, far more than any previous generation, and a lot of it they do outside the classroom (!)."  Nielsen counted 2,272 text message per month by teens with cell phones earlier this year.

But with all the reading and writing going on, and with a revolution in process, where are the outcomes?  If the revolution is, in fact, producing creative and inventive new literacies, they should show up somewhere.

But we don't see any gains in reading comprehension for 17-year-olds on NAEP exams, the SAT, or the ACT.  The last NAEP writing exam showed some improvement at the very lowest end, but no improvement in "proficient" or "advanced."  Remedial reading and writing course enrollments are heavy, and the Chronicle's survey of college teachers found only six percent of them claiming that students are "very well prepared" in writing.  And businesses keep spending billions of dollars each year on remedial writing training for employees.

Of course, this doesn't mean that a revolution isn't going on, only that its effects are indeterminate.  That may throw us back upon temperament, the pessimists vs. the optimists. Right now, I'd say the available evidence runs to the former.