Wide Angle Lenz [beta]

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.