Brett Schwarz

Professor Werry

RWS 101

6, September 2014

Intro and Body Paragraph

Since the introduction of the internet man has wrote more than ever before? Has tweeting, blogging, and emailing helped turn this generation into one that writes as much as we read? Clive Thompson addresses how the internet and social media have formed this literate generation in his paper “Public Thinking.” This paper is an excerpt from his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better, published on September 12, 2013 by Penguin Press HC. Thompson aims to show people how much our writing has improved due to the internet. Also Thompson throughout this paper is providing evidence to answer main question of his paper, “So how has all this writing changing our cognitive behavior?” (Clive Thompson, Public Thinking 51). Clive’s goal is to show people how much the technology today has changed the way we write and how often we right now as well. Today not only working professionals produce written pieces. Teens do on social media and many adults are sending out emails multiples times a day. Thompson uses many examples from history to support his claims in a more direct way to show how people would use the internet as a resource today and how people would have been better off in their endeavors if they have had the internet. In this paper, I will examine how people write better depending on their audience, how the internet has turned our generation into a writing generation, and how the internet is a connection-making machine.

Many people perform better when there is an audience that they are performing for or writing for. “In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often makes runners or musicians perform better” (Clive Thompson, Public Thinking 54). This is known as the audience effect. When people write and it is for an assignment or an email, people tend not to take the time to write their best. Now if one were to write a paper and they knew many people would have access to it they would take their time to write a piece of work that they would be proud of. Thompson notes in his paper that Brenna Grey Clark, professor at Douglas College in British Columbia, used this concept to see if her students would perform better on their essays. So she had her students write essays about Canadian authors and told them that their essays would be on Wikipedia, a highly public website where the audience can respond and alter entrees. Thompson quoted Clark stating, “Often they are handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they were staying up till two a.m. honing and rewriting their entries” (Brenna Clark, Public Thinking 56). The internet helped connect Clark’s students to an audience in which gave them incentives to write at a much higher level. Through the use of the internet and the concept of the audience effect, the behavior in which the students wrote was far more superior than that at which they had been writing at before. Analytic and critical thought, which causes one to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more have been found to be a healthy component of the audience effect.