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September 1, 2009, 11:30 AM ET

Can Twitter Turn Students Into Better Writers?

A number of academics believe that writing on the Internet, in all its varied forms, can improve student prose. Mark Bauerlein is not one of them. The professor of English at Emory University noted in his Brainstorm blog post on Saturday that "we don't see any gains in reading comprehension for 17-year-olds on NAEP exams, the SAT, or the ACT," referring to the battery of standardized tests taken by teenagers. If Twittering, texting, and the like really improved writing, Mr. Bauerlein argues, surely the tests would show some evidence.

He has made this point before, in a June 11, 2009, Chronicle article by Josh Keller about studies of writing on the Internet. He called claims of Internet-derived writing prowess "either grandiose or flatulent."

That same article, however, described the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year study of nearly 14,000 pieces of student writing, done for class and beyond it. Though final data analysis has not been done, early results indicated that in their Internet writings, students took pains to cultivate tone and voice, and to address a particular audience. "The out-of-class writing actually made them more conscious of the things writing teachers want them to think about," said Paul M. Rogers, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University who is involved in the study.

As non-anecdotal evidence on writing skills creeps in, it could change the curriculum, perhaps banishing Internet-driven composition from the classroom, or perhaps encouraging it.

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Comments

1. grantgibson - September 01, 2009 at 05:21 pm

uhm- very interesting

2. derekbruff - September 01, 2009 at 07:33 pm

I wonder if students are more aware of the importance of audience in writing, given that they write more for particular audiences--largely on social networks, but audiences nonetheless. Perhaps students find traditional writing assignments (where the instructor is the only audience) more artificial and less meaningful than they used to? I've had my students write for their peers (by posting student papers to a course blog and asking students to respond to each other's work), and many of my students found this assignment highly motivating.

3. alex369 - September 01, 2009 at 08:06 pm

Formulating the question in this way helps us avoid asking the more pertinent question: Does Twitter Turn Students Into Worse Writers?

4. alex369 - September 01, 2009 at 08:07 pm

Formulating the question this way helps us avoid asking the more pertinent question: Does Twitter Turn Students Into Worse Writers?

5. freddynager - September 01, 2009 at 09:19 pm

Any study of Stanford students should be instantly dismissed as trivial and irrelevant to anyone outside of Palo Alto. What Stanford students do is hardly representative of the average young American. Indeed, how many people of any age take pains to cultivate tone and voice? What a ludicrous study.

As for Twitter, the 140-character limit certain makes a tweeter consider their choice of words. It could lead to more conciseness in writing. Or it might lead to more sentences like this:

"RT @bob2367 did u see this? bit.ly/lmnop - LOL WTF? ;) #humor"

We may be spawning an entire generation of R2D2's.

-- Freddy J. Nager, Atomic Tango LLC

6. chriskox - September 02, 2009 at 05:10 pm

Derek,

Since when is the instructor the "only audience" for tradtitional college paper writing? The instructor may be the only one interested in reading them, but one hopes they were not written for her audience only.

7. derekbruff - September 02, 2009 at 08:43 pm

@chriskox: I'm not sure I follow. Most college papers are written by students for their instructors and those instructors are the only ones ever to read those papers. Who else would be potential readers of these papers? No one else sees them in most cases.

8. pengland - September 03, 2009 at 01:53 pm

Do pencils turn students into better writers? What about pens? Paper, anybody?

Technologies with which we produce written work often ease the process of recording symbols, and it could certainly be possible for a given technology to encourage an action associated with writing: pencils, for instance, encourage revision more than pens. But to assume that the agency of improving writing resides within the tool itself is foolish. Writers improve writing, just like plumbers improve plumbing. The difference is that writers spray their crap all over the place and plumbers dispose of it neatly.