B&G Response Ch. 2-3

One line really jumped out at me while I was reading: "The assumption of reform is so strong that a new medium is now expected to justify itself by improving on a predecessor...." But it makes me wonder about what this is doing to literacy and formal writing. As a teacher, I feel like my students' abilities to write a good email have deteriorated. This semester, I finally put a section about email etiquette in my syllabus because I was tired of getting emails with no greeting, no signatures, and fragmented messages that I rarely could understand. So, as technology like email "improves" over it's predecessor, that doesn't necessarily mean it's improving the people who use it. If a student was required to sit down and write a letter on paper to her professor, they would probably take a lot more time with it and be more inclined to stick with the conventions of formal letter writing. Now, email is too conversational, and I feel that often times the email writers forget to think about who their audience is and then compose their emails accordingly.