OMG
In a nice contrast to yesterday’s piece about how KISS lady says that texting and blogging are leading to the destruction of writing skills throughout the land, Techdirt links to CNN today with information about a study on the effects of texting and online writing on children’s schoolwork. I generally find statistics based on self-reporting to be suspect at best, but they’re always interesting as food for thought. Some of the more interesting pieces of information:
- Half of teens sometimes fail to capitalize and punctuate properly
- 64% of students have used at least one informal element in their school writing
- Two-thirds of students do most of their schoolwork writing by hand, not computer
- Teens who keep blogs are more likely to engage in personal writing
The two things that I liked the most in this story were the parts where they talked to the people behind the study and found out their thoughts. Advice for teachers:
“It’s a teachable moment,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew. “If you find that in a child’s or student’s writing, that’s an opportunity to address the differences between formal and informal writing. They learn to make the distinction … just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing.”
Thoughts on the progression of language over time:
The chairman of the commission’s advisory board, Richard Sterling, said the rules could possibly change completely within a generation or two: Perhaps the start of sentences would no longer need capitalization, the way the use of commas has decreased over the past few decades. “Language changes,” Sterling said.
That last one is an especially great contrast to KISS lady. She sounds like a giant fuddy-duddy in comparison to a guy who can just say “Language changes.”
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