"Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again."
Although the study suggests that this "explosion of prose" is in fact good writing, I still can't help but question the fact that as it gets easier to share your thoughts with the world via blogs, Twitter, self-publishing, etc. we will eventually start drowning in a sea of mediocre to terrible writing.
"The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see."
Knowing your audience is certainly important to better writing, so long as your thoughts don't become tailored simply to impress your readers. Generally speaking, though, it's nice to know that writing isn't going the way of the dodo anytime soon, and of course it's a plus that smiley faces and texting-speak haven't entirely replaced real writing.
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