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OMG: Social Media May Wreck Your Kid's Writing

From Opposing Viewpoints in Context Ruth Campbell covers K-12 and higher education for the Southeast Missourian.

Increasingly, even very young students, such as those in kindergarten and first grade, are familiar with technology and the use of keyboards. Students are more and more likely to do the bulk of their writing on social media or via texting. They become used to leaving out punctuation and using abbreviations. Because of this, they can have trouble switching to more formal English in order to write papers or reports or other assignments. However, familiarity with technology can also be an advantage, since many jobs now require computer and social networking skills.

Convertible laptop computers are being loaded with software Friday for Central High School students to begin using in January [2014]. Teachers say the usage of computers and social media on smartphones has caused students' writing skills to wither.

The prevalence of Facebook, Twitter and texting has all but obliterated punctuation, capitalization and apostrophes in schools, threatening the future of formal writing, educators say.

And it's no wonder. Cape Girardeau public school students, for example, start learning keyboarding in kindergarten to get them used to technology, curriculum coordinator Theresa Hinkebein said. But she noted kindergartners already know how to operate smartphones and have computers at home.

Keyboarding itself doesn't have an effect on grammar and formal writing, but with people relying more on electronic devices, physical handwriting also is disappearing. Hinkebein said students are taught cursive writing the second semester of second grade, and kindergarten through 12th-grade students are taught when it's inappropriate to use informal language.

"Our teachers really try to help our students understand the difference between formal and informal writing," she said.

But students come to school "already immersed in technology," Hinkebein noted. Students are more likely to commit certain grammatical errors because they use the conventions of texting, tweeting and Facebooking in their formal academic essays.

Assistant superintendent for academic services Sherry Copeland said though spell-check and grammar software exist, students still need to know how to spell and use correct grammar.

Copeland said she has been on job interviews where a prospective employer has asked her to sit down and write something longhand.

Southeast Missouri State University writing instructor Eric Sentell said in an email to the Southeast Missourian that since he began teaching six years ago, he's noticed a difference in the quality of students' writing.

"Students are more likely to commit certain grammatical errors because they use the conventions of texting, tweeting and Facebooking in their formal academic essays. Occasionally, I see actual 'text language,' like using the letter 'u' instead of the word 'you,'" Sentell wrote.

Most of the time, it's lack of capitalization, punctuation and apostrophes, Sentell said.

Atwood said economic and education background affect electronic literacy, as well. "If you were raised ... middle class or above, you're probably technosavvy," she said. "People in some of the lower income brackets, not so much," because they haven't had access to technology. "It has affected students' ability to write and write coherently. They have to relearn what they might have already known, or learn new skills that they never mastered, because again, they're used to writing informally and now we're asking them to write with a much more formal ... purpose, defending their reasoning, and that's not what they're doing when they're communicating, oftentimes, between friends," Atwood said.

Older students, meanwhile, struggle with the basic computer skills that are needed even at lower-paying jobs. Also, a lot of the assessment tests students take in high school or adult education programs are computer-based. "They have to have the ability to keyboard and communicate their thoughts in that manner," Atwood said. "The use of pencil and paper is going away."

Over the next year, Atwood said, her program will launch a transitions course in which adult education and literacy staff will work with students on the next steps to take after earning a high school equivalency diploma. "Because that or a high school diploma will not be enough to earn a living," she said.

Half of teachers say digital tools make it easier to teach writing, 18 percent say those tools make it more difficult.

Adult Education has a resource called Missouri Connections, an online program that allows students to access interest surveys, do research on employment, put together resumes and get information on interviewing.

Missouri Connections also has a section on postsecondary education. "We'll help our students use those resources," Atwood said.

If employment is what students want as their next step, she said, the program will help them, and if further education is the goal, support also is available.

An online survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, in collaboration with the College Board and the National Writing Project in 2012, conducted among 2,462 middle- and high-school teachers showed while half of teachers say digital tools make it easier to teach writing, 18 percent say those tools make it more difficult. Socialmediatoday.com notes Twitter has made people more concise, as has blogging. Meanwhile, teachers in the Pew study "expressed concerns about the 'creep' of informal grammar and style into 'formal' writing, as well as students' impatience with the writing process and their difficulty navigating the complex issues of plagiarism, citation and fair use."

·  68 percent of teachers polled by Pew say digital tools make students more likely to take shortcuts and not put effort into their writing.

·  46 percent said these tools make students more likely to "write too fast and be careless."

Social Media Helps Students Write Better

From Opposing Viewpoints in Context Andrew Simmons is a writer, teacher, and musician. He has written for The New York Times, Slate, and The Believer.

Many people argue that the slang encouraged by social media has a bad effect on student writing. However, social media can help students, especially male high school students, reveal emotions and discuss topics that make their writing more powerful and honest. Male students are usually encouraged to be silent, contained, and not reveal emotions. On Facebook, however, students routinely discuss personal issues and emotions and receive praise for doing so. This greater freedom to express themselves improves their writing at school.

The Internet has ruined high-school writing. Write the line on the board five hundred times like [cartoon character] Bart Simpson. Remember and internalize it. Intone it in an Andy Rooney- esque grumble. I've heard the line repeated by dozens of educators and laypeople. I've even said it myself.

Thankfully it is untrue.

As a high-school English teacher, I read well over a thousand student essays a year. I can report that complete sentences are an increasingly endangered species. I wearily review the point of paragraphs every semester. This year I tried and failed to spark a senior class protest against "blobs"—my pejorative term for essays lacking paragraphs. When I see a winky face in the body of a personal essay—and believe me, it has happened enough to warrant a routine response—I use a red pen to draw next to it a larger face with narrow, angry eyes and gaping jaws poised to chomp the offending emoticon to pieces Pac-Man-style. My students analyze good writing and discuss the effect of word choice and elegant syntax on an audience's reading experience. The uphill battle is worth fighting, but I'm always aware that something more foreboding than chronic senioritis lines up in opposition.

However, while Facebook and Twitter have eroded writing conventions among my students, they have not killed the most important ingredients in personal writing: self-reflection and emotional honesty. For younger high school boys particularly, social networking has actually improved writing—not the product or the process, but the sensitivity and inward focus required to even begin to produce a draft that will eventually be worth editing.

High school is cruel to all genders, an equal-opportunity destroyer of spirit and self-esteem. I'm focusing on boys because I've seen the phenomenon play out more intensely with them. Also, I was a boy once, and so I understand them better than I understand girls.

The emotional distance fostered by Facebook and other sites can encourage a healthier candor. When I was beginning high school in 1994 boys knew not to reveal weakness and insecurity. Girls didn't seem to like guys who vocalized vulnerability. Athletes usually projected

stereotypically masculine traits: along with imposing physical size, aggressive, even belligerent confidence, an easy stance, gait, and casual presence, the signs of being comfortable in their own skins. Even the scrawniest punk guitarists wore hoodies like armor and possessed a prickly toughness seasoned by the experience of having been bullied in middle school. The climate demanded stoicism, cool detachment as the default attitude for boys trying not to lose social standing. Young male attitudes were, as they still are, shaped by music and other forms of pop culture. Mainstream mid-90s rappers had cold-blooded personas. Even [rock singer for Nirvana] Kurt Cobain mumbled through interviews, only opening up in cathartic song, where the rawest admissions could be obtuse and readily cloaked in distortion. Everyone agonized over problems—height, acne, academic ability, body size, a lack of attention from girls, parents splitting up, sick grandparents, needy siblings, general alienation—but no one wanted to talk about them much. At age 14, I was small, smart, and artistic. I wrote well, but the prospect

of writing anything that would permit even a teacher to know what I really thought terrified me. Spilling my guts in a writers' workshop with my classmates would have been social suicide. Social networking has dramatically altered how high-school boys deal with their emotions.

I have a Facebook page dedicated solely to my position as an educator. I don't send friend requests to students but current and former students can send them to me and I always accept. I don't post much, but I keep up with some students and share literature-related links when I delude myself into thinking they'll be of interest. Current students often send me requests without thinking of the possible consequences of being Facebook friends with a teacher. I have made it a policy to avoid bringing a student's posts into a conference with a parent or counselor unless required to do so by law. A few times a week though, I log on and observe what students post.

My observations have reaffirmed the widely held notion that the Internet is no refuge from the pains of adolescence. It's a really bad neighborhood. On Facebook and Twitter, students humiliate, jeer, and shame one another. They engage in antisocial, even criminal behavior— leaving belligerently racist comments on links, harassing classmates with derogatory posts.

At the same time, the emotional distance fostered by Facebook and other sites can encourage a healthier candor, too. On Facebook, even popular students post statuses in which they express insecurities. I see a dozen every time I log on. A kid frets that his longtime girlfriend is straying and wishes he hadn't upset her. Another admits to being lonely (with weepy emoticons added for effect). Another asks friends to pray for his sick little sister. Another worries the girl he gave his number to isn't interested because she hasn't called in the 17 minutes that have passed since the fateful transaction. Another disparages his own intellect. "I'm so stupid, dad told me to drop out," he writes. Another wonders why his parents are always angry, and why their anger is so often directed at him. "Brother coming home today," another posts. "Gonna see how it goes."

Individually these may seem like small-scale admissions. But the broader trend I have witnessed in the past few years stands in sharp contrast to the vigilance with which my generation

guarded our fears both trivial and deep. In this sense, social networking has dramatically altered how high-school boys deal with their emotions.

Instead of being mocked for revealing too much, students who share in this way win likes and supportive comments from male friends. Perhaps part of it is the fact that girls appear to appreciate the emotional candor and publicly validate it with likes and comments, giving boys the initiative to do the same. In high-school halls, guards stay up, but online, male emotional transparency is not only permitted but also celebrated. Surely, the current crop of "sensitive" rappers has also encouraged this—especially standard-bearer Kanye West, who treats albums like therapy sessions and doesn't mind welling up on national television. In addition to their insecurities, boys share affectionate admissions of platonic love to one another that they wouldn't feel as comfortable sharing in person. They post "I admit" and "To be honest" notes on one another's pages in which they celebrate fraternal bonds.

Just as social networking frees users from public decorum ... it allows my students to safely, if temporarily, construct kinder, gentler versions of themselves as well.

"You my bro cause you always have time to talk." "Even when there no one else you got me." However trite, these public expressions may be the seeds of richer revelations.

Because it happens on the Internet, the candor is a simulation of how a more evolved young male culture might operate. Despite the Drake pics captioned with the rapper's soft-headed couplets, the fight videos, and the countless time-wasting surveys and games that pollute the average high-school student's feed, I see the online social universe my students traverse as an improvement over my high-school terrain. Many of my students grow up in households in which machismo reigns supreme. They've never been allowed to cry. Their mothers and sisters cook and wash the dishes and clean. They've been encouraged to see themselves as dominant, powerful, swaggering, sullen men, not sensitive and reflective men, powerfully kind, confidently open. Fostering those traits is a woman's responsibility, like housework. In this sense, Facebook is a genuine outlet for the young men I teach. Just as social networking frees users from public decorum and encourages the birthing of troll alter egos, it allows my students to safely, if temporarily, construct kinder, gentler versions of themselves as well.

The great news is that this has a positive effect on teaching and learning. My students in 2013 are more comfortable writing about personal issues than were my classmates in the mid-late '90s. When I assign narrative essays, students discuss sexual abuse, poverty, imprisoned family members, alcoholic parents, gang violence, the struggle to learn English in America—topics they may need to address, not merely subjects they believe might entertain or interest a reader.

After all, we write for an audience and we write for ourselves too. I see students recognizing the value of tackling these topics with honesty. I notice that they are relieved when they do so. Sometimes students address the same topic in several essays over the course of the year, updating me, their confidante, on the status of a specific situation. When they share these essays with the rest of the class, they turn the two-way conversation (their writing, my feedback) into a network. Writing isn't just about the spilling of guts, obviously, but the transparency encouraged by social networking has laid the foundation for this freedom. When this freedom results in powerful, honest writing, it can in turn result in true healing for kids— not just the momentary reassurance a well-received status update may provide.