Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts – I Know What I Think

Too many times I have now witnessed my students writing in modern day hieroglyphics. Most times, I must admit that I am not even sure what they are saying to one another.

How about you? Do you know what they are talking about?

ZUP – MUSM – ?4U

TPM – U WAN2 STUDY HERE?

YG2BK – CD9

LEMENO BOUT TPM – TLK2UL8R

While I tend to worry about all this texting and shorthand, wondering what it must be doing to kids ability to write, it seems I may be way off base. That is if you read the very surprising assessment of students and their writing skills by Clive Thompson at Wired Magazine.

First and foremost, Thompson takes exception to the conventional wisdom that student writing skills are diminishing and that the reason for the deterioration is technology. Instead, he dares to suggest that the digital age is helping students become better writers than their predecessors.

According to Thompson, our youngsters are not only actually writing more now than they ever did before, they are becoming experts in writing for specific audiences.

Common View Today

Thompson summarizes the current technology critics thus:

“Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into ‘bleak, bald, sad shorthand’ (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned).”

To which he asks, not so rhetorically:

“An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?”

Thompson goes on to answer his question by expounding on the work of Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Seeking to get a grasp of how student writing is evolving, Lunsford collected nearly 15,000 writing samples over the better part of five years to analyze.

Those specimens included the traditional student work, in-class assignments, formal essays and journal entries. It also included a look at student emails, blog posts and chat sessions.

According to Lunsford, the gloom and doom is overstated. In fact, she would contend that “…technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

This new direction is one Lunsford calls life writing – it seems that “young people today write far more than any generation before them ….. so much socializing takes place online …. and it almost always involves text.”

Lunsford refers to it as life writing since 38 percent of it occurs outside of the classroom. Thompson notes:

“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.”

And as for all that texting and the world of abbreviations, we simply must assess this development carefully. It seems that the most positive aspect of Lunsford’s research involved the concept rhetoricians call kairos.

The term is used to describe the technique of assessing the audience for whom one is writing. The basic premise focuses on the writer’s ability to adapt “their tone and technique to best get their point across.”

In other words, while texting and socializing online with friends, students might use multiple abbreviations and include smiley faces. But when it comes to writing a real academic paper, students never mistakenly insert such informality.

Perhaps most importantly, the texting and socializing appear to be incredibly meaningful in a student’s development as a writer. Lunsford found that “Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.”

Authentic Learning

Teachers today are encouraged to make learning authentic, to teach real world applications that allow students to effectively comprehend the rational for studying a concept. Clearly, the online world is a location for students where authentic writing can be found.

We may raise an eyebrow or two over what some of that writing looks like. But the idea of writing is to find the right words to clearly communicate with others.

In fact, most writers would insist that the ability to get an idea across with the fewest words possible defines the best communicators. Under such a premise, it would seem our kids actually are making the fewest possible words concept into an artform.

And as noted earlier, the right words vary for the audience at hand. The texting may not set well with us, but we teachers must realize it is not intended for us in the first place.

Flickr photos courtesy of ianturton and fensterbme.