OMG! Teens using :)&LOL @ skool April 27, 2008
Posted by Will in advertising & media.Tags: new media, school
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As I sit and wait for my girlfriend to get out of work at an elementary school there is a pack of middle schoolers hanging in the playground area near the car. Young, energetic and completely obnoxious, nearly all of them are standing there conversing with each other holding their cell phones and carrying on what I can only assume are at least two conversations: one with the group of friends, the other with whomever they are texting to. This is perfect because I just got done reading Anastasia’s post on Ypulse about Pew’s latest research on teens, technology and writing.
Here’s a summary of some of Pew’s findings:
While teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world and craft a significant amount of electronic text, they see a fundamental distinction between their electronic social communications and the more formal writing they do for school or for personal reasons.
- 87% of youth ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites
- 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as “writing.”
Teens are utilitarian in their approach to technology and writing, using both computers and longhand depending on circumstances. Their use of computers for school and personal writing is often tied to the convenience of being able to edit easily. And while they do not think their use of computers or their text-based communications with friends influences their formal writing, many do admit that the informal styles that characterize their e-communications do occasionally bleed into their schoolwork.
- 57% of teens say they revise and edit more when they write using a computer.
- 63% of teens say using computers to write makes no difference in the quality of the writing they produce.
- 73% of teens say their personal electronic communications (email, IM, text messaging) have no impact on the writing they do for school, and 77% said they have no impact on the writing they do for themselves.
- 64% of teens admit that they incorporate, often accidentally, at least some informal writing styles used in personal electronic communication into their writing for school. (Some 25% have used emoticons in their school writing; 50% have used informal punctuation and grammar; 38% have used text shortcuts such as “LOL” meaning “laugh out loud.”)
Eight in ten parents believe that good writing skills are more important now than they were 20 years ago, and 86% of teens believe that good writing ability is an important component of guaranteeing success later in life.
I have a younger sister who is graduating high school in a month and she texts a lot more than I do. Her high school experience has been much different than mine for various reasons. Technologically, cell phone and laptop saturation into high school students’ belongings was in its infancy while I was in high school, so from time to time I have had the opportunity to see how she and her friends use mobile phones. Seeing the massive amount of texting she and her friends do – and of course all of Mellennials – along with instant messaging, Twitter and all the other various socializing that happens via the Internet, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that this is infiltrating student writing skills. I like writing well, and I think it’s a skill that you must have under your belt as one of your key professional skills, so it took me a long time to start using abbreviations and acronyms while chatting. To this day I have a hard time typing “2nite” or even “u.” The fact that iPhone automatically spells out words and whatnot just encourages me more to type whole words out.
Anyway, my point is that the generation in middle school and high school now are a part of the first generation to have these devices and abilities to communicate at the ready and it’s slowly starting to show in writing an actual paper. Bad grammar and texting short hand in class is obviously not the fault of the school system, but the school systems should look at this data seriously and consider how they can attack this problem head on. The tactics that were used to teach even me won’t work on the students in high school now (I graduated high school in 2003). How can teachers try infusing proper grammar in electronic communication? Maybe a class can writer a paper via Twitter posts or in a Facebook group. Online socializing is only going to increase and I doubt that word short hands are magically disappearing either, so that means the school system needs to step it up and start thinking outside the box to reach its students. I use spell and grammar check as much as the next, but I hate the idea of students relying more and more on the spell check and grammar tools to expand on their “writing skills.”
Two points I think are worth mentioning. The first is that written English is incredibly redundant. The average information content per character is somewhere in range of 0.5 bits (naively you’d expect to have to use 6 bits per character to uniquely represent the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks in written English). This is why abbreviations like OMG, LOL, and 2nite don’t interfere with the ability to be understood (by people who are familiar with them).
The other is that language is evolving alongside our culture. It *is* culture. What kids should learn in school is to be able to recognize good writing and to create good writing of their own. The difference between writing they do for school and that they do for themselves is an externally imposed distinction. The changes in the way we communicate are here to stay, and we can’t expect that such sweeping changes will not be reflected in the language we use and encounter. The grammar and constructions we all learned in school evolved out of English that people actually used. If kids are learning about how to make language choices based on audience and message, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that an emoticon or an OMGWTFBBQ has slipped into their writing. It reflects the culture they live in, and we shouldn’t want to whitewash that.
[...] OMG! Teens using
&LOL @ skool « Wide Angle Lenz (tags: teens electronic text) [...]
As usual, Spike has very insightful views on the subject. Very well put, Spike, I agree with you. I hadn’t thought of your second point through completely, but I’m certainly glad you brought t up! I think it’s perfectly fine for writing to continue to evolve – and now I’m really digging the (very obvious now that you’ve enlightened us) point that culture is reflected and changed through writing – but I think that my point is still valid for the school systems and look forward to seeing how writing is taught in a generation. Although there will always be a distinction between formal and informal writing, I’m curious to see how the 21st century short hand creeps into both.
Some new research you might be interested in: the article is in a speech journal behind a paywall, but Ars Technica has a good summary up. Basically, they find that teens are more formal in IM conversation than in spoken language and that abbreviations and “IMspeak” only accounts for 2.4% of the vocabulary they use on IM.