April 25

On Texts, Tech and Teens

The finding that 38 percent of high-school-age students have used abbreviations like “LOL” in school assignments — with 25 percent admitting to having slipped in an emoticon or two — sounds like enough to make the typical English instructor dread the next incoming freshman class. After all, according to a report released on Thursday, half of those teenagers “sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation” in essays and other school assignments.

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The report, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools and Colleges, leaves open the latter as a possibility even as it calls for more research on how technology can best be marshaled in the writing classroom.

For now, it’s clear from the findings that the vast majority of students (86 percent of respondents) think that writing is important to their future success. At the same time, 85 percent of them use “some form of electronic personal communication” — such as e-mail, instant messaging and text messages — on at least an occasional basis, even though most of them don’t classify it as “writing” per se.

“[D]espite the nearly ubiquitous use of these tools by teens, they see an important distinction between the ‘writing’ they do for school and outside of school for personal reasons, and the ‘communication’ they enjoy via instant messaging, phone text messaging, e-mail and social networking sites,” the report states.

It later continues: “At the core, the digital age presents a paradox. Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging e-mails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.”

The report, “Writing, Technology and Teens,” is based on a survey conducted last year of 700 children from ages 12 to 17, each accompanied by a parent, in addition to eight focus groups in four different cities. While it focuses on students currently in middle or high school, the portrait it paints is applicable to many of the incoming freshmen at colleges across the nation who will surely enter their first composition or English class. As such, it provides a window into some of the issues educators at the postsecondary level will increasingly have to grapple with: students’ increasing expectations for shorter and less nuanced assignments, for example, as well as changing reading and writing habits.

About 93 percent of respondents said they wrote for their own pleasure outside of school, and evidence suggests that an increasing fraction of that writing is done online, either on social networking sites or in blogs. But in class, 82 percent said their assignments tend to be a paragraph to a page long. Part of the problem, the authors suggested, is finding ways to move that excitement about writing into rich, engaging assignments in the classroom.

“We always want more from students. I think that this explosion of writing is actually a very good thing,” said Richard Sterling, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and the departing executive director of the National Writing Project. “Society at large is fast, quick-paced; a lot of the media is in small bites, and that does get reflected in their writing. There tends to be a kind of breathless pace to a lot of the work that they produce,” he said.

So the job of educators is to “get students to slow down and be more thoughtful and more reflective about what they’re reading and what they’re writing,” added Sterling, who also contributed to the survey.

And the smilies? Sterling suggested that if a “;)” ever shows up in an assignment, “you actually have an opportunity ... a teachable moment” to instruct students on when such expressions are acceptable and in which contexts more formal language is required.

Cheryl Ball, a professor of English at Illinois State University who is chairing the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication (which employs what an English professor would recognize as alliteration), said that there is still not enough knowledge about students’ writing habits at home versus at school, and how technology should be used to best improve the teaching of writing.

But she also stressed that writing instruction shouldn’t necessarily be restricted to typical forms like the academic essay, and that educators should consider how to incorporate newer modes into their teaching.

Ball suggested, in an e-mail, that “educators need to attend to the ways that students conceive of ‘what counts’ as writing, be capacious in our own definitions of writing and recognize that writing will continue to expand to include forms such as the report mentions [like] IM, social networking and multimedia. I look forward to teaching more students who have such an expansive view of writing, even if they don’t call it that.”

— Andy Guess

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Comments

It is unfortunate

It is unfortunate that so many secondary schools, encouraged by attitudes we often see on this very site, regard “writing via technology” as something other than writing. That schools choose not to embrace, and to teach with, the arts of not just personal communication (the contemporary equivalent of the letter) but also public communication (blogs, such as this) means that a remarkable opportunity to build better writers is lost.

Writing thus becomes limited in importance and in quality because educators have oft determined to limit their definitions of writing.

‘Put down those pens John and Abigail Adams, you are simply wasting your time writing personal letters!’ ‘How ridiculous Tom Paine, wasting your time penning political pamphlets!’ ‘How pointless Alexander Hamilton, throwing time away posting your thoughts in barely edited newspapers and not even signing what you say with your real name!’

If more educators would meet student writers where they actually are, and work with them on the whole range of text communication, I’d imagine student writing might improve, and educators might spend less time bemoaning the fact that students “don’t know what is appropriate.”

Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 6:55 am EDT on April 25, 2008

not just technology

I look forward to reading the complete Pew Report and thank Inside Higher Education for this story.

I am looking for more insight into a series of apparent disconnects in the use of technology, perception of literacy and even in general follow-through by the students here at a smallish, public urban university with a critical mass of first generation and also underprepared students.

Our students use technology but do not access their offical university e-mail accounts often enough. The students work a a great deal outside the university and follow through with the demands of those jobs...but often do not apply the same work ethic to their “schhol-jobs.”

Now, there seems to be a disconnect between how students “see” writing. Perhaps by extension, this carrries into how these same students perceive “reading” and “literacy.”

I realize these issues may not converge, but I do see parallels. I am interested how these various dicotomies or disconnects function in the lives of the students and how to take advantage of the knowledge to better connect them to an academic culture.

Theron, at 8:50 am EDT on April 25, 2008

Where will tech apps lead us...

As a tired old re-fired professor now leading business classes, a couple of comments seem appropriate: 1. All writing is intended to be persuasive. Writing to just provide “information” simply cannot be written without bias. 2. All writing is “Communication” with intent to change thought. Why else do it?3. I cringe at the reluctance of learner who refuse (or cannot) adopt a commonly accepted format of persuasive writing. But then again, How do I know what will persuade the new learners to action? Logic? or unbridled emotion expressed in a blog?

Bloom taxonomy experts are wrestling with the same problems as all of us and have revised the “old” (1950’s) thinking process to an updated format. Here’s the link for those who are interested:http://techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196605124

Where are we headed...?

Edward Winslow, A “tired” refired Old Business Professor, at 9:10 am EDT on April 25, 2008

Emoticons

Come to think of it, what is so wrong with emoticons in writing? In a way, they are simply invented punctuation marks. In another way, they are visual additions to writing. Writing (in the Western world)has had many visual additions through the ages, such as ornate capitals in medieval manuscripts, modern typefaces (which convey meaning!) and poems that take a certain shape. I don’t use them because I think they are hokey, but maybe that’s because my vocabulary of emoticons is limited.

Grocheio, Asst VP Planning and Institutional Effectiveness at Shorter College, at 10:15 am EDT on April 25, 2008

Writting Research Report

The classic report with paragraphs arranged into an introduction, body, and conclusions generally fail in today’s business world. PowerPoint slides are restrictive, but now common. How many on-line publications incorporate pictures, graphics, graphs, tables, and links? Almost all.

In electronic reports, the “table of contents” menu box is common, with short sections of multi-media content visible for a specific section of the report. Links tie the information to references and additional detail. Readers pick and choose their desired level of exploration and can easily skip around or skip entire sections.

Writing for electronic delivery is critical for the modern business world. In order to produce reports that meet the needs of a diverse audience, electronic delivery has many advantages. The ability to embed clickable links to other reports, other sources, and additional levels of detail is something the antiquated hard-copy reports can not achieve. The primary advantage is that the visual design allows information to be organized, glossary links embedded, and the reader can choose the desired amount of detail via links. Electronic delivery of reports reduces publication costs.

The electronic format also allows the reader to more easily re-locate specific content. Electronic delivery of reports allows the reader to electronically file, archive, index, and organize reports into a personal library. When cited, extended quotes from the report tend to be more accurate.

Moving the creative writing mentality into business writing, complete with multi-media formats, will challenge many English faculty. Moving from Guttenberg to digital will be harder for the faculty than for the students. Finally, using a computer word processing program as a typewriter is not the same as using digital multi-media for communicating. Writing after all, is about communicating.

Bob, at 1:10 pm EDT on April 25, 2008

Texting and English Literacy

Thanks for your interesting article on texting and kids. You might be interested in our recent research in this area. My colleagues and I have been studying the impact of “textisms” on writing. In a study completed in late 2007, we asked a sample of 678 pre-teens, teens, and young adults to tell us how much they use certain textisms in their daily written “online communication” and then asked them to write a formal letter to a fictitious company. We then used a standard scoring rubric used to assess writing quality (and did not deduct points for using textisms in their letter unless it affected the rated quality) and found some staggering results:

1. The use of “contextual textisms” such as smilies, using special characters to indicate feelings (e.g., *hugs*), or using all capital letters to suggest strong emotions WERE NOT RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR FORMAL LETTER.2. HOWEVER, the use of “language-based textisms” such as acronyms (LOL), shortened words (tht instead of that), and removing apostrophes (wont instead of won’t) WERE NEGATIVELY RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING. In particular, those who used more of those textisms produced worse writing samples than those who your fewer even after partially out gender and age!

We had hoped that this was not going to be the case (there is some scant data from England suggesting the opposite) and are now exploring it further with a larger sample of subjects and two writing samples – a formal one and an informal one – in the hopes of gaining more clarity on the impact of textisms in online communication on writing in the classroom.

For more information on our work please visit www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com. Dr. Larry RosenLROSEN@CSUDH.EDU

Dr. Larry Rosen, California State University, Dominguez Hills, at 5:00 pm EDT on April 26, 2008

Writing and English Literacy

Given the topic of this article, you might be interested in our recent research in this area. My colleagues and I have been studying the impact of “textisms” on writing. In a study completed in late 2007, we asked a sample of 678 pre-teens, teens, and young adults to tell us how much they use certain textisms in their daily written “online communication” and then asked them to write a formal letter to a fictitious company. We then used a standard scoring rubric used to assess writing quality (and did not deduct points for using textisms in their letter unless it affected the rated quality) and found some staggering results:

For more information on our work please visit www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com. Dr. Larry RosenLROSEN@CSUDH.EDU

Dr. Larry Rosen, at 2:00 pm EDT on April 28, 2008

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On Texts, Tech and Teens

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Comments

It is unfortunate

not just technology

Where will tech apps lead us...

Emoticons

Writting Research Report

Texting and English Literacy

Writing and English Literacy

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Assistant Professor — Instructional Leadership Jacksonville State University

Professor and Chair — English Languages and Literatures University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Secondary Student Outreach Facilitator (Tech Prep) Community College of Philadelphia

Early Childhood Specialist II Lake Washington Technical College

Assistant Professor of English, Probationary/Tenure-Track Nine-Month Apptmnt*, Contingent on Funding St. Cloud State University

Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor of Social Studies Education Georgia Gwinnett College

Faculty, Associate Degree Nursing Lone Star College System

Assistant Professor of English — British Modernism James Madison University

Position Openings University of Texas at El Paso