Scholarly and academic types have long bemoaned the rise of technology and it's apparent effect on how kids write, often siting text messaging and chat rooms as sources of this downward spiral to illiteracy. However, it looks like these claims may be put to rest as new research from Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University supports a dramatically different conclusion.
As part of the project: "The Stanford Study of Writing", Lunsford and her colleagues have carefully mulled over a total of 14,672 different writing samples. From blog posts to traditional in-class prose, numerous contemporary forms were studied from 2001-2006.
Her conclusions are in direct opposition to the typical complaints of the critics. Lunsford believes that we're in the midst of a literary revolution, as opposed to some kind of plunging decline. She noted that young people today get far more practice writing then the once did before the internet age. It used to be that once a person graduated and left the educational realm they were unlikely to pursue writing again. Now almost everyone spends a great deal of their spare time writing online, often to an audience, which Lunsford also notes is a major difference between modern students and those of years past.
Today's youth are particularly adept at adapting their prose to meet the demands of an audience and have explained in interviews that they consider good writing to be that of a persuasive nature. Lunsford concludes by mentioning that even with freshman writers the much scorned text-messaging speak never made its way into their prose, showing that young people know that there's a time and place for such short-hand.
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