In an article titled “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy,” journalist Clive Thompson reviews Andrea Lunsford’s five-year study of changing writing and literacy norms of students, as well as newly-formed texting culture. The author describes youth attitudes to modern writing and concludes that with the development of technology, a cultural paradigm of writing has shifted from the text quality to appeal to the audience. To present his point of view and convince readers of it, Thompson uses several classic rhetorical strategies such as deductive reasoning, the appeal to authority, descriptions, and emotion-laden words and phrases. Readers can trace the rhetorical technique of deductive reasoning both in separate paragraphs and throughout the whole “the New Literacy” article. The essence of this method is that the literary structure of constructing the argument begins with general and abstract terms and theses and ends with narrower and more specific concepts and conclusions. Reasoning in the framework of the text, the readers notice a subsequent transition of the argument from “kids today can’t write” and “age of illiteracy” to “literacy revolution” and “write for an audience” (Thompson). The author appeals to broad stereotypes like “bleak, bald, sad shorthand,” which are familiar to the audience and further focuses on the core of the phenomenon, namely “online media are pushing literacy,” for understanding (Thompson). The competent application of this strategy is clearly visible even in the first paragraph, whose purpose is clearly to parody and ridicule the opinions of conservative literary skeptics about youth literacy. For an evidence basis, Thompson uses data from the linguistic study and the researcher’s opinion. The persuasive effect of deductive reasoning is reinforced by the frequent use of the appeal to authority to build an evidence basis. Clive Thompson refers to authority through a number of direct in-text quotes, paraphrases, statistics, and other parameters and the results of Andrea Lansford’s research. The author presents this rhetorical tactic in the form of quoting credible specialists and materials, as well as providing excerpts or whole statistics to convince a more sophisticated and skeptical reader. For example, according to Thompson, “Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” The effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy is due to the fact that modern readers are accustomed to trusting the information provided only if there is scientifically proven data. However, in order to develop understanding and further conviction in the author’s argument, it is not enough to give figures and expert opinions. Another aspect of rhetoric is the creation of mental images. That is why in the second half of the article, Thompson describes what younger generation literacy, writing, and texting culture and rules looks likes, also resorting to comparisons with ideas that are familiar to the audience. The author explains the new writing paradigm by describing the structure of Lunsford’s study, modern prose, text messages, and statuses as well as st