Texting and Writing Ability

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Last year on the program, we talked about David Crystal’s book, Texting the Great Debate. In this book, David laid out the idea that the new language that was occurring online, in text messages, in instant messaging, in email, in Twitters, in tweets, and so forth, that these kinds of modes of writing and transmitting information weren’t harming the language at all. And in fact, that they represented a new way of expression that was just as valid as any other way we’ve expressed ourself in long form or short form, aloud or in print.

And here’s another study that we find that says exactly the same thing. Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University has done a study of Stanford students, a longitudinal study over a series of years, in which she examined their kinds of writing, online and off, for classwork and not for classwork, and discovered, as she puts it, that we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization. In other words, she feels like all of this extra writing that young people are doing, and by young, let’s say, college age and younger, is helping them, that it’s encouraging their ability to express themselves and to communicate and to write better English, write more thoroughly, to speak more precisely and to say what they mean and to say it in the way that suits the audience.

And I think, Martha, the reason I bring this up is because it confirms something that I’ve encountered repeatedly, which is even though you tell people this, they tend to disallow it. And I was reading Wired magazine where Clive Thompson wrote an article about the Lunsford study for Stanford. And almost all of the comments ignore the evidence. Almost all of the comments say that can’t possibly be true or it’s counter to my experience that today’s kids are stupid and somehow that they’re lacking in the intellectual strength of the prior generations.

And my response to that, and you’ve probably heard this before, and forgive me, Martha, but I’m going to say it again. My response to that is if you believe that the kids today are stupider, you’re considering the wrong kids. You’re comparing the best of your generation with the worst of this one. Because today’s kids, they’re fantastically brilliant. They’re so smart, I can’t even believe it. I don’t know where those kids were when I was growing up, but I didn’t know them. And frankly, the best of this generation is the best of any generation, as far as I can tell.

Okay, maybe they don’t suit your idea of great and good and strong. Or maybe their idea of being great at communicating online doesn’t match with sitting down with a quill pen and an ink bottle and scrubbing something out on parchment. It’s a different kind of literacy. But they write more per day, seriously, I kid you not, than previous generations wrote in a year. They write astonishing quantities of information, thousands of words a day. It is true. It is true. And it’s really hard for people to swallow that. It’s like a big horse pill.

And the media love to grab onto that story and just run with it. The idea that texting is making kids stupid. I mentioned the Clive Thompson article in Wired. His closing line is a great summary of this idea here. The kids know their audience. They know who to write for. They know how to write academic papers. It’s true. You have to teach them. We all had to learn. We all had to learn that the kind of stuff that we would write in the back of the yearbook wasn’t the same kind of stuff that you would write at the top of a paper or that you would put in an essay that was going to give you your final grade for a class.

Yeah, we all had to learn that, right? Well, yeah, and I think that’s really key because, as I understand it, studies show that kids do know how to code switch from one way of speaking and writing to another, right? You rarely see, for example, the word late spelled with the numeral eight in an academic paper, right? In a school paper. No, I don’t. And if you do see it, it’s an exception. It’s not the rule. And it’s a rare exception.

Clive Thompson puts it this way. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all. We’ll post links to the Lunsford study on our website as well as a link to the Clive Thompson’s article in Wired magazine, which has a pretty good summary of it. And if you’ve got comments about the way young people speak and write today, do let us know. Dissenters, welcome. The number is 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.