Young people today write more than any generation before them


Yeah, I figured that title might get your attention (or the attention of a search query). Young people today write more than any generation before them. Not something you hear from educators much these days.

Kids today can't write. Right? I think that has been said a lot over the years and over the centuries. The culprit the past 50 years has probably been technology. Movies, TV, videogames, the Internet. Twitter tweets, Facebook status posts, blogs, PowerPoint bullets, text messages.

Not according to Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She organized the Stanford Study of Writing to look at college students' prose.

The study looked at about 15,000 student writing samples - in-class writing, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.

And what did she find?   "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

Technology is reviving writing, not killing it. How? Literacy in new directions.

One thing she found was that young people today write more than early generations because they do all that socializing online and most of that involves writing text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom?life writing, as Lunsford calls it.

Okay, she hasn't convinced you.

How about this? Pre-Internet, the claim is that most writing that occurred was because of a school assignment or as part of a job. The Stanford Study students were very adept at kairos.
kairos: The opportune occasion for speech. The term kairos has a rich and varied history, but generally refers to the way a given context for communication both calls for and constrains one's speech. Thus, sensitive to kairos, a speaker or writer takes into account the contingencies of a given place and time, and considers the opportunities within this specific context for words to be effective and appropriate to that moment. As such, this concept is tightly linked to considerations of audience (the most significant variable in a communicative context) and to decorum (the principle of apt speech).  http://rhetoric.byu.edu
Do you agree? Are your students good at assessing audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across? Clive Thompson writing for Wired agrees with the study.
We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
Check out the study at http://ssw.stanford.edu. Then you can post your comments here. Or email Professor Lunsford.

Language and Technology Blogs

The results of the poll for the Top Language Blogs (which I wrote about in more detail earlier) have been posted. The ones that interest me the most are the Top Ten Language Blogs for "Language Technology" which focuses on blogs discussing technology as part of the language learning process.

No, Serendipity35 did not make the list, but I checked out the top 10 and found a few familiar bloggers and a few new ones to add to my reader. Most of the blogs are not hardcore language blogs but EdTech blogs that discuss language learning at times.

The list reinforces my perception that there are just many more teachers in the K-12 world blogging, creating their own social networks etc. than there are in the higher education world.

The One-Credit Online Writing Course

I am reading that the University of Arizona is developing a one-credit online writing course that will be used to supplement three-credit GenEd (general education) classes.

It's one way to address a problem a problem that occurs on campuses where enrollment is growing and  the number of staff and the facilities to support them have not increased.

This is true of many writing centers, and they often have problems meeting the increased demand. For better and for worse, online versions are often seen as an economically feasible solution.


At PCCC, we use eTutoring, but we don't have anything like an online writing center. Since our center is only a year old, we are fortunate that our roll out is in phases and that we won't be expected to support the entire community (which would include college-level, basic skills and ESL populations) for three more years.

An online writing course could be viewed as a form of writing across the disciplines. At UA, the course will be introduced as a one-credit supplement to the typical three-credit general education class. It is intended to provide an interactive and self-paced online environment in which students' writing skills are diagnosed and improved.

According to an article on the UA course:


"...the courses will not replace gen-ed classes, but instead will support them with needed writing instruction that is not available in the typical 50 minute lecture period...The online course will offer tutorials on topics in writing not ordinarily covered by professors, such as grammar, drafting a thesis and style and craft.
Writing proficiency will be tested by a diagnostic system that will, depending on the student's score, direct him or her signed to target a given problem area. These modules will feature flash animation and other interactive software tailored to the specific skill level of the student.

Thomas Miller, English professor and associate provost of academic affairs, pointed out that the online course will help deal with problems in writing essays before it's too late. He said that students all too often realize they have significant problems in writing only after their papers are returned with a poor grade. Miller added that research on writing pedagogy shows that "students do not read teachers' comments on their papers. They often do not understand comments they read and do not apply them." The online course is intended to remedy this problem by developing students' writing skills before a paper is even assigned to them.The course will "take them through the writing process," Miller said. "It will help them draft a research question or thesis and will include strategic visits to the writing center."

It's an interesting idea. At PCCC, our approach is to try to incorporate these skills into the GenEd courses. We are designing 20 distinct courses across disciplines as writing-intensive and trying to better equip those faculty to support their students' writing, as well as sending students to our writing center for face-to-face help and sending them online to use eTutoring.

One reason that we chose this path is because we wanted to also include faculty in the learning process. A good part of our initiative effort goes to professional development. We are trying to help faculty improve their ability to create writing assignments, facilitate assessment and utilize technology to do it.

We will probably need to look at putting more online each year because we need to support two small satellite campuses, and our online students.

In Other (and new) Words

It will be a quiet summer for me with just a few staycations planned where I will just sip some acai juice (even if that makes me not a locavore) and try not worry about my carbon footprint or unpleasantries in the news like waterboarding.

So, I worked 5 of this year's new additions to the 2009 update of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary into that awkward opening sentence. A staycation ("a vacation spent at home or nearby") is one of about 100 additions that includes words I have heard used this past year like acai (Brazilian Protuguese for "a small dark purple fleshy berrylike fruit of a tall slender palm (Euterpe oleracea) of tropical Central and South America that is often used in beverages").

I wrote earlier here about the Global Language Monitor's Millionth Word March which announced that the millionth word to be added to English was lexeme. Consolation prizes for Web 2.0, slumdog, octomom and the rest of you for playing our game.

Some of the new words seem a bit old to me already - carbon footprint, earmark, waterboarding, cardioprotective, locavore, naproxen, fan fiction, flash mob, sock puppet, vlog, webisode, memory foam, and missalette must have finally met the time test so that they made it into the dictionary club.

I imagine there are plenty of neologisms (a new word for new words) that did not make the cut this year.

I'm not sure we need a word like "precycling" to describe that process of thinking about a purchase with a mind to how it will be later recycled, though I like the idea that people might be doing that more now than ever before. (Do we really need to add upcyle, e-cycling and e-scraps?)

It's getting as hard to keep up with all these words as it is to keep up with all the technology.