Public Thinking Summary:

The objective of “Public Thinking” written by Clive Thompson was to persuade the audience that online writing has benefits. The author mainly focuses on how on writing has developed over the years. He claims that writing isn’t always formal, over the years writing has changed and become more technology based. He gives many examples of the different ways people use technology now-a-days to write. He emphasizes that writing is something that is continuously growing and adapting to new ways to express information.

One of Thompson’s main claims is that the internet is a way for people to communicate with and through their writing. Some of the examples he mentions are: blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. He justified that these are different ways of writing that have grown over generations, but he indicates that using the internet for writing is still helping the writer. He believes that the writer learns so much from the little blog posts he or she writes because they always receive feedback. This idea that Thompson mentions allows the people to collaborate on each other’s work; allowing both the reader and the writer to grow.

A big piece of evidence that Thompson used in his article was the experiment he did on children and college students. This experiment was to see if people’s writing changes when the audience of their piece is different. For example, is there a difference between a student writing to a professor and a student writing to post on the internet. In the article Thompson states, “…comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communication to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connection, and learn more.” This is very strong evidence for Thompson’s claim and experiment because it proves that people write better when they know an audience is watching. People change the way they do things when they know that someone is going to read it. They put more time and thought into their writing instead of just throwing something together.

The way Thompson organized his writing made it very easy for the reader to be persuaded. The strategies that he used played a big part in how he was able to catch his audience.  He used a lot of logos which strengthen his argument of online writing having benefits. Thompson used relatable examples throughout the article which stuck out to the reader. He became a reliable source to the audience when he packed the article with data and real-life experiments. Thompson threw in some assumptions the audience had to trust him on and they were able to do this because they identified him as a ligament source.  This allowed Thompson to squeeze in his own thoughts and ideas, but the audience believes what he says because he established his credibility with the strategies he used throughout the whole article.