Maybe all that online chatting and social networking isn’t the worst thing for our kids after all.
Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, has developed a long-term project called the Stanford Study of Writing, whose purpose is to analyze the text of students from 2001 – 2006. There was no discrimination regarding source; essays and assignments were used alongside e-mail, instant messages, and blog posts. And instead of the expectation that today’s youth are creating increasingly stunted and poor writing, the opposite has been found.
Apparently, the brevity of online communication is teaching us how to write more directly and succinctly, as well as ingraining into us how to adapt our writing style to whichever audience we’re speaking to. It turns out that with online social sites like Twitter and Facebook, knowing that we’re writing for public consumption really brings out the best in our prose.
Despite fears that the shorthand usually seen in texts and instant messages — LOL for “laughing out loud”, as an example — would make its way into critical work, Lunsford admitted that she never once spotted any of that in class assignments.
So, the nice thing about this for us parents is that our text-heavy age is making our kids better communicators, even if it’s behind the scenes, as it were. There will still be a use for teaching proper grammar and syntax and punctuation, of course, but the always-on nature of the Internet means that our kids — and ourselves as well — will exercise these lessons on a daily basis, thus ensuring a lifetime of clear speech and strong comprehension.
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