Clive Thompson, writing for Wired Magazine, has an interesting take on the current state of student writing. He states: online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis—from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs—has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.
A writing renaissance?
…sorry…that posted before I had finished my thought…
*ahem*
Hardly. I wouldn’t call “kin u gve me somry of Olv Twust!?! Plz help!!” anything close to “Haiku-like”
(This is an actual Homework Question from a public library website).
While I do think that brevity is, indeed the soul of wit, and putting constructs such as character length on writing can lead to interesting results…I’m not convinced that texting and twitter language Leads to Better Writing. I think Reading and Writing leads to better writing. Not “writing the bare minimun of what I need to, regardless of spelling or punctuation, leaving it up to the Reader to figure it out” (“Oh, you KNOW what I mean.”).
Now, I think there are exceptions to this: Stephen Fry (stephenfry.com) has really interesting tweets (One of my favorites is when he “wept like a spanked baby” at the opera). But in terms of young people writing and learning to write, I think it causes just as many problems as solutions.
Just my two cents.