Or at least the difference between women and gardening implements.
I’ve worked in educational assessment for six years, and have in that time read thousands of essays written by kids between the ages of 8 to 18. Thus far I’ve worked on contracts from roughly half of the states in the US. From my perspective the quality of writing is dictated more by geography than by age of the writers. Some regions of this country consistently produce better written work across all grades than others. But on the other hand, with one glaring exception (a state we like to refer to as “aggressively mediocre”), every state we’ve worked for has shown some improvement over the years, not declines. Not all states are showing vast improvements, but I can’t think of any where we’ve groaned and complained that the kids’ writing is getting worse. And I do mean the actual quality of writing, not the scores they receive on their essays. You know what they say about statistics…
Perhaps what professors are seeing now is the tail-end of something, because there’s very clearly been some catalyst to cause many of the departments of Education to require more effort be put into teaching writing over the past 3 or 4 years. When it comes to those who are in grades 3-12 now, I’d say at least 2/3rds of them are writing at an adequate level for their age. Is that so different from adults?
Writing in one format for one particular use does not have any impact on a person’s ability to write in another format in a different situation. What you describe is communication additional to more traditional contact, or which has taken the role of another informal method of contact (telephone, for instance). So how can it have had any effect on formal writing skills?
I can tell with my students’ writing (I work with grades K-12 mainly) which ones read a lot, and which ones don’t, be it spelling mistakes on common words (see a word often enough and you’ll know how to spell it), to fracturing idioms, to improper preposition usage, you name it. A inveterate reader knows what good writing looks like, and will pick up on the basic points of good style. Someone who never reads won’t, and it will be (often painfully) noticeable.
One thing to keep in mind is that there’s going to be a significant difference between the types of students who attend college in their late teens and early twenties and those who attend later in life. Very few people in the latter group are attending college because of some vague notion that it’s what they ought to be doing–instead, they’ve done some soul-searching and have specific reasons for going back. Of course, that can’t explain the entire difference, but you have to account for it as a confounding factor.
Well, they never used to write “u” for “you” or “ur” for “your” in essays before the proliferation of electronica.
Thanks for sharing this - it’s a welcome bit of optimism.
This is something my father, who teaches night classes at a community college, has also mentioned to me. He chooses to teach night, rather than day, classes because the night students – most of whom are older and also holding down a job while they try to complete their degree – are far more motivated, and far more appreciative of the opportunity to learn.
Day students he equates with 13th graders.
Write, or type? If the latter, then yes, there might be a crossover of habits. No different to when I have asked ‘cite?’ on a different forum, and afterwards realised it looks a bit odd :smack:
Yes, it might also be a symptom of their lack of skills at formal writing, but it does not demonstrate the cause of this. Otherwise you need to explain why many who use such spellings and forms of writing elsewhere can produce essays with none of those traits.
I’ve seen it handwritten on essay placement tests.
Explanation: It goes back to the “no sense of audience” factor. I abbreviate things in chats and text messages because there’s no room or need to write everything out and it’s not academic or subject to evaluation anyway. If I’m going to write an essay, short story, formal letter or similar document, I know not to use those abbreviations because they would be inappropriate. Many students do not make this distinction.
‘Many students’? This is the point I have a problem with, and are questioning. If a majority of your students are writing l33t essays, then not only you will notice it but the entire institution? Surely?
If a minority of students are doing this, then maybe they’d be the minority you’d be concerned about anyway?
I wouldn’t say that it has no impact whatsoever. I guess if you’re already versed in good writing and grammar, then it might be the case where you are able to “swtich modes” and not have it affect your writing. But if it’s some of the only writing (and reading) you’re used to doing, then of course it’s going to affect how you perceive the written word.
For example, look at the use of the comma. There are rules as to its usage, but there is some disagreement on how they should be applied. In texting, hardly anyone uses commas. There are situations where I know that leaving a comma out will make my text more confusing, but knowing that I need to hit 9 buttons to get to one (or rather one button 9 times) generally dissuades me from using it. This was different in the states, when a comma could be achieved with a mere 2 buttonstrokes (can I coin that?), and I did properly punctuate my texts. I can’t be arsed most of the time these days.
My point is that since some of the rules regarding the use of commas are tenuous at worst or in dispute at best, the only way you’ll ever have good perspective on what constitutes good usage is to read a large body of material and see how people generally regard the comma. If your daily reading mostly includes texting, you’re not going to have a good perspective on how most people use the comma.
That’s why I mentioned the lack of reading in an earlier post. People tend to have a much better grasp of punctuation, spelling, structure, syntax and more if they actually read books. I tell my students that if they want to improve their writing, they must improve their reading as well.
Of course. Do you think that people are born with writing skills?
Of course. They’ve been reading academic or formal writing more.
15 years? Professors at Yale over a hundred years ago were lamenting the same things you lament here now. What you should lament is that you chose to teach academic writing. But you can be happy that you didn’t go into teaching ESL academic writing, as I did, which is 10 times more difficult.
I am a writing teacher, and I find this one of the least problematic things. It’s a simple transposition of oral language to written language. Yes, they must correct it eventually, but it’s not the most serious thing to worry about. Coherence and cohesion are more important. Pendants who don’t know much about teaching writing zero in on the petty things first, because they’re easier to teach. Figaro, please don’t fall for pedantry; you won’t help your students with that. Tackle the important things first. It’s not easy, I know. But do the right thing. Please don’t take a red pen (never use a red pen!) and mark commas, etc., on the first draft. Wait until the third draft for that kind of thing.
First draft: Content (coherence)
Second draft: cohesion and organization
Third: Grammar and punctuation.
Email from younger and older students are going to look different because younger and older people use technology in different ways. Older people use email primarily in a professional context. They are used to emailing their bosses and co-workers.
Younger people use it in informal social situations, and probably have no experience using email in a professional setting. Naturally, they arn’t born with a sense of how to use email professionally and this sort of thing is not taught in school. So they are going to email the only way they know how- informally.
Another factor is that immigration may be rising in your area. People who are writing in their second language are going to be less likely to get it right. I shudder to think of what I’d write if I had to write an essay in French.
My college required a writing placement test before entry. Students with low scores (the majority) were required to take an intensive writing class their second quarter of Freshman year. Additionally, all students must take a writing intensive literature/cultural studies class their first quarter of freshman year. This serves to get them used to thinking and writing on a college level.
It isn’t a technology thing - its a language thing. Compounded by the casual nature of society today. When I was a whippersnapper and we didn’t have email to write to teachers, we would write notes - but because we were writing to teachers we would take care to use full sentences and something approaching proper grammar and make some attempt at spelling. Notes slipped into your best friends locker could be casual - notes written to a teacher were at least slightly formal. So that by the time you got to college and your first job you understood that YOU changed for your audience.
My own kids (2nd and 3rd grade) write at least two notes to their teachers every year, with their mother telling them they have to show good spelling and write a nice note. (Christmas time and a thank you note at the end of the year).
There also seems to be (and I’m finishing up my second go at college, so I see some of this) a sense of “I shouldn’t have to change who I am, this is my style and other people should accept me for who I am.” Its a very small minority of students who expand the concepts of diversity right down to ‘you need to accept a badly written paper because - hey, I’m an individual’ - but I’ve run into one or two. I’m all for diversity of opinions and diversity of culture. I’m much less fond of working on a team with someone who writes their section of the group paper in a manner that needs to be completely rewritten to be even understood and doesn’t have “English as a second language” as an excuse - unless perhaps for these people written English actually is their third language - after L33t and textspeak.
We get them once in a while filtering in at work. For the most part our business chat reads more like the Straight Dope - fairly complete sentences, few abbreviations. But its filtering in. I understand chat on a phone (I have a crackberry I do email on, it isn’t a good place to type), when you have a full keyboard in front of you - use it.
Agreed. Saying that just because kids use email to write informally to their friends doesn’t mean they haven’t ever heard of the concept of formal writing. And it’s not even really formal. Just taking the time to make sure you don’t say “thanks you” is different than drafting a business letter. To me it shows a marked deficiency, I’m just not entirely sure what it’s a deficiency of. I wanted to say lack of respect, but that doesn’t quite fit. I’m just not sure where the disconnect comes from when a student doesn’t consider it beneficial to not sound like a complete idiot to the person who is grading him.
I was a student peer tutor for three years in the late 1990’s at my university of choice, which happened to be a state run university with an “open enrollment” policy. They accepted all applicants with a high school diploma or the equivalent.
Boy howdy, did it ever show.
You may assume by the fact that they sought tutoring that the students I served were trying to improve. This is mostly true. However, the worst performing students were those attending for the purpose of athletics (I hate to stereotype, but it was really true in my experience). They were directed to get a tutor to make the minimum grades required to avoid being benched. Their teachers were trying to meet them more than half way. I tutored a student whose history teacher instructed him to “just read this one paragraph and write a sentence telling me what it is about.” That was his essay. Summarize the single paragraph in the text book.
He couldn’t do it.
I had another student, an econ major IIRC, who was failing pretty soundly. I asked him why he chose his current major and he had no idea. It was just something to do. If you got him talking about car repair or building framing, however, he lit up. He was brilliant.
This seems idiotic to me. Why, as the writer, would I not want to know right off the bat where all my mistakes are? I want to learn how to write, not how to correct all the “petty things” at the end. I also find it alarming you’d consider grammar and punctuation to be “petty things” and teach your students to regard them as such. Maybe this style of teaching is contributing to the problem?
Also, what’s the problem with using a red pen? It’s been years since anyone’s corrected a piece of writing of mine, but I recall it sure made it easier to find and correct the mistakes.
Bubonic?