September is the month of the year when (at least since I was in college) some academic or other pronounces on how literacy has gone to the dogs and this generation is the most illiterate in human history.

The perennial lament.

This week brings us a nice surprise: Clive Thompson reported in Wired magazine Monday on a new study by one of the most distinguished researchers in the field of composition and writing theory, Stanford Professor Andrea Lunsford.

Thompson writes (this is music to my jaded ears, by the way):

"An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

"Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples -- everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to e-mails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"'I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization,' she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it and pushing our literacy in bold new directions."

This is great news from one of our most respected authorities on student writing. From her Web site, I see that Andrea Lunsford has been the "Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric since March 2000." She has chaired several MLA commissions on writing.

She has no vested interest in either praising "digital natives" or castigating them. Her vested interest is in studying how well students write today.

Here's the url for her Web site: http://www.stanford.edu/~lunsfor1/

She's not pronouncing on everyone. Her sample is just 14,672 Stanford students. But her point is that it is those students who pundits (non-experts in writing) insist are becoming more and more illiterate every year.

She insists, now, if you actually use careful metrics and look at the research, the decline is chimerical. In fact, students are getting better. Digitality is good for literacy.

(You can find the Thompson article on the Web: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson.)

Now, does this mean students everywhere are improving? No. It means we need new studies. But we cannot always be comparing apples (those eager new students sitting in our classes) and oranges (our memories of students past).

In a study of the same set of students, someone who has made her career judging writing uses her assessment skills, experience, and tools to pronounce "improvement."

The same kinds of rigor need to be applied to other groups, too. Including those who, traditionally, for the last 40 years, have seen dramatic decline in educational levels. It is possible that digital access, where it is available (and that is by no means a given) has even helped here.

What makes me especially pleased about this study is that it is by someone with impeccable credentials, not a pundit with an ax to grind or a headline to make, but someone who does research on this area.

It's not just my opinion versus yours.

In my next tedious argument about "the youth today going [again?!] to the dogs," I plan to just cite Lunsford's work and let the pundits produce their counter-evidence.

Cathy N. Davidson is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

This article originally appeared on her blog, http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson, and is reprinted with permission.