A recent Associated Press article entitled  "Not all :) as informal writing creeps into teen assignments" discussed another fascinating study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that included the following findings:

• Nearly two thirds of teens 12- to 17-years-old admitted to using some informal writing styles ("textisms") in school writing assignments.
• Half of the teens said they sometimes use improper capitalization and punctuation in school assignments.
  
• More than one third use acronyms such as LOL in their school writing.
• 86% of teens believe that good writing is important to success in life.
  

My colleagues and I have been studying the impact of "textisms" on writing.  In a study completed in late 2007, we asked a sample of 678 pre-teens, teens, and young adults to tell us how much they use certain textisms in their daily written “online communication” and then asked them to write a formal letter to a fictitious company complaining about a product and asking the company to take care of the problem.  We then used a standard scoring rubric used to assess writing quality (and did not deduct points for using textisms in their letter unless it affected the rated quality) and found some staggering results:

• The use of “contextual textisms” such as smilies, using special characters to indicate feelings (e.g., *hugs*), or using all capital letters to suggest strong emotions WERE NOT RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR FORMAL LETTER.

• HOWEVER, the use of “language-based textisms” such as acronyms (LOL), shortened words (tht instead of that), and removing apostrophes (wont instead of won’t) WERE NEGATIVELY RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING.  In particular, those who used more of those textisms produced worse writing samples than those who your fewer even after controlling for gender and age [removing their effects]!

Our results are particularly troubling given a recent study by the College Board which found that the SAT Writing Test to be the best predictor of freshman grades.

We had predicted that textism use was not going to be negatively related to writing ability based on data from England suggesting the opposite.  We are now exploring these findings further with a larger sample of subjects and two writing samples – a formal one and an informal one – in the hopes of gaining more clarity on the impact of textisms in online communication on writing in the classroom.

I believe strongly that writing is an important activity, regardless of one's age.  As a university professor I am finding that more of my students "produce" writing, whether it be the kind of writing that marks proper English;  short communication bursts replete with LOLs, wonts,  :-) and missing characters; web sites; MySpace pages; blogs; or commentary on what they read about other peoples' writings.  I firmly believe that our job -- as parents, teachers, or bosses -- is to take advantage of the writing experiences of these Net Generation and Generation X pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults and weave them into daily life.  For example, on the college level, there are numerous tools to allow students to produce online commentary on course material.  I, myself, am finding more uses of my campuses online system called BlackBoard to provide writing experiences for my students.  For example, I may pose a question online concerning a recent study or something that we have discussed in class, and have students post their own thoughts plus respond to the comments of other, fellow students.  I insist that they simply write, in any way that makes them comfortable, which often includes a myriad of textisms.  The result is that I get some fascinating discussions of the type I would never see in a large class or in a class with students who are not comfortable speaking in front of their fellow students.  In fact, often the most prolific commentators are precisely those students who are shy in the real world.  Our research bears that out. 

Research shows that a vast majority of Net Geners and Gen Xers feel more comfortable sharing their feelings and opinions in their screen life rather than their real life.  It becomes our challenge to figure out ways to take advantage of this sense of disinhibition that many of these younger generation members feel from their years of living anonymously "behind the screen."  For example, rather than rave about the negative aspects of teen MySpace or Facebook pages, take advantage of the ease of creating these representations of the self and discussion groups and encourage -- no require -- students to move some of their classroom work to the virtual world.  We should recognize that these tools are here to stay and that pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults have grown up sharing  ore of their feelings and opinions in virtual worlds than in their real worlds.  I expect the younger generation to be even more so with Club Penguin, WebKidz and literally dozens of other online social networks being populated by children as young as late elementary school.  We can make this proliferation of technology and media use work toward helping students write and produce their thoughts in a way that is comfortable for them.  Given this base, I believe that we can then use these tools to move their more formal, school based writing to a higher level while allowing them and encouraging them to use their online language as a way to this teaching experience.

Return to Dr. Rosen's website for more information on his research, books, and commentaries.