Yancey's Writing in the 21st Century

Yancey describes three challenges of writing in the 21st century. They include developing new ways of writing, designing a new curriculum supporting those models, and creating ways for teaching these models. Yancey tells us that in the past, writing was a delicacy because a lot of people did not have that advantage. Today writing is just known as a great sense of labor, which makes people not want to do it as much, especially on their own without anyone telling them to do so. It is not as easy as reading, which is associated with intimacy and warmth. She argues that writing is a lot more intimate, because writing is how you interact and contribute to the material you read, or your writing could be the material someone else reads. Self sponsored writing is defined as the act of writing on your own intensions. Self sponsored writing takes place in more areas than you would think; including: tweeting, texting, posting a facebook status, blogging, etc. This article is so important because the meaning of literacy has changed over the years and teachers and professors should realize this and help contribute to the literacy through writing of students today. This article describes literacy through writing not as only composing on paper, but also on social media and interacting with it.