Here’s a few sample tweets from fellow college students, displayed here anonymously:
You be the judge: Is Twitter ruining the quality of college students’ writing?
It’s tempting to say yes. The above tweets lack punctuation, capitalization, proper grammar, and even context clues about the subject. They are an English major’s nightmare.
Journalists and college professors alike seem to agree. Cambridge University professor David Abulafia expressed frustration that even top students “no longer know how to write.” They use texting abbreviations in their exams; have difficulty creating “coherent” arguments; and are all-around struggling to write well. Students often require ‘remedial’ English classes to bring their writing up to university standards.
I disagree. (And not just because one of the above tweets is actually mine: bonus points if you can figure out which one!)
Social media sites, which place restrictions on character counts and encourage rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness posts, actually have a positive influence on student writing.
Think about Twitter and its 140-character tweet limit. There is only so much that you can say in 140 characters, if you’re a long-winded writer like me. But if you’re creative in your command of the English language, you can say a lot in that space without using many characters at all.
Twitter encourages concision. It almost punishes you for going beyond the character limit, in that it cuts you off before you can finish, like the wrap-up music they play at awards shows.
As an English major, I’m inclined to ramble on for pages about any given topic. (This post would be 2,000 words long if I didn’t confine myself to a word count!) I’m tempted to condemn Twitter for its blatant disregard for punctuation, grammar rules and correct spelling… but I can’t do it.
I’m jealous of writers that know how to express their main ideas in a sentence or two. That’s something I need to get better at— (see my attempts in the gallery below)
—and it’s something a lot of college students need to learn.
There’s a lot of payoff for learning to write coherently in fewer than 140 characters. University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management offered a full $37,000 scholarship to an applicant who best expressed him or herself within those exact parameters in 2011. Scholarship winners linked out to creative multimedia content. Those entries were short, sweet and to the point, unlike most college-level essays.
Colleges need to teach students to write concisely, and to do it well. Speaking from experience, it is easier to pad pages with fluff than it is to cut and slash until your paper is just a few paragraphs long.
Does that mean we should start putting character counts at the bottom of our papers? Maybe not today, but in the future, who knows?
Human Spellcheck 