"Writing in the 21st Century" by Kathleen Blake Yancey

In today’s progressing medium of writing, there are three challenges we must face: developing new models of writing, designing new curriculums to support those models, and creating models to teach that curriculum.  In terms of historical perception in the 20^th century, writing never received the cultural respect reading did because reading controlled citizens, while writing could give them power.  It was also considered ambivalent because it was associated with unpleasantness.  Also, it required a lot of labor in and out of school.  It was primarily used for testing purposes in academic settings.  Science and progressivism furthered writing instruction to be accepted as something liberating that could express thoughts about specific interests.  From the 60s to 80s, the new conception of process writing emerged and the personal computer transformed the creation of texts even more.  In the 21^st century, it seems as if writers are everywhere since web 2.0 allows for “publishing” to occur anywhere on the Internet.  Also, writing online has expands its purpose from just sharing and starting dialogue to becoming an act of participation.  Now, composition does not need to be taught through formal instruction, but rather through social co-apprenticeship.  As long as you take action to compose something, it will be read.  It shows the power of networking and that the traditional pyramid with print media at the top followed by online and social has changed.  Now there are multiple models to compose, each with new practices, materials, and vocabulary.

Being part of the generation Y that was raised in the Age of Information, this essay truly summarizes the quick evolution of composition in the 21^st century.  When you can personally witness and experience virtually everyone around you become “authors” of some sort, it forces one to realize that writing composition is not a strict formula, rather it is dependent on societal tendencies, which in turn, are directly influenced by technologies.  Thus, those challenges presented by Yancey are very real and we must adapt to them in order progress.  This is not to say that we should abandon entirely the traditional philosophy of composition, but we must emphasize that it is an era of dramatic change and rhetorical composition is being redefined.  At the rate of things being published, albeit a 300-word blog post or an instant 140-character tweet, the idea of authorship as an exclusively limited concept is being erased.  Everything is now shared.