Thompson Essay
Nathaniel Lee
Professor P. Hiebert
RWS 100-07
10 September 2014
Thompson Essay Clive Thompson, in his chapter excerpt “Public Thinking,” from the book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better published by Penguin Group, argues that the development of technology of mass communication improves the user’s writing and their ability to collaborate. To support his argument, he incorporates statistics to show the enormity of the production of writing, anecdotes to connect with the reader’s emotions, experiments to support the claim that people perform better in front of an audience, Stanford Study of Writing to support the claim that students are writing more than before and history to debate how the scientific progress would have been furthered with the current ability to collaborate. His purpose is to explain how technology improved the users’ thinking and writing in order to convince his audience that it has made people more intelligent. Thompson adopts an informal tone for his audience of students and parents by using simple language and pronouns.
Thompson uses statistics to show the enormity of the amount of writing from the Internet. He gives the readers an example of the enormous production of everyday writing from social media and text messages. It is difficult to argue against statistics because they are facts with a numerical value.
Thompson claims the amount we are writing today is immense because of new technology. He states that we all write over 12 billion text messages and “3.6 trillion words daily” (Thompson 43). It’s hard to argue that these are not big numbers. He gathers statistics of writing from the most popular social media websites which accumulate to billions of messages a day. This evidence, I believe, is absolutely credible because these statistics are from international companies that have great reputations. I find this totally relevant to the overall thesis because it shows how much people
Professor P. Hiebert
RWS 100-07
10 September 2014
Thompson Essay Clive Thompson, in his chapter excerpt “Public Thinking,” from the book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better published by Penguin Group, argues that the development of technology of mass communication improves the user’s writing and their ability to collaborate. To support his argument, he incorporates statistics to show the enormity of the production of writing, anecdotes to connect with the reader’s emotions, experiments to support the claim that people perform better in front of an audience, Stanford Study of Writing to support the claim that students are writing more than before and history to debate how the scientific progress would have been furthered with the current ability to collaborate. His purpose is to explain how technology improved the users’ thinking and writing in order to convince his audience that it has made people more intelligent. Thompson adopts an informal tone for his audience of students and parents by using simple language and pronouns.
Thompson uses statistics to show the enormity of the amount of writing from the Internet. He gives the readers an example of the enormous production of everyday writing from social media and text messages. It is difficult to argue against statistics because they are facts with a numerical value.
Thompson claims the amount we are writing today is immense because of new technology. He states that we all write over 12 billion text messages and “3.6 trillion words daily” (Thompson 43). It’s hard to argue that these are not big numbers. He gathers statistics of writing from the most popular social media websites which accumulate to billions of messages a day. This evidence, I believe, is absolutely credible because these statistics are from international companies that have great reputations. I find this totally relevant to the overall thesis because it shows how much people