Informal Style Of Electronic Messages Appearing In Schoolworks
According to Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing study around two thirds of 700 students surveyed admit that they often use e-communication styles in school assignments. As a result, some students omit punctuation and capitalization, while others use emotions or text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laugh out loud.”
The New York Times quotes Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, who considers that this isn’t worrying at all.
“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.
The study has shown that most students do not consider e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings to be “real writing”. The survey results show that more than the half of students have an account in Facebook or MySpace and around 27 percent appear to be rather active in the blogosphere and social networks.
Most teenagers write for school nearly every day, the study found, but most assignments are short. And many write outside school, on their own, although that varies significantly by race and sex. Almost half of black teenagers said they wrote a personal journal, compared with 3 in 10 whites. And nearly half of the girls keep a journal, compared with only 3 in 10 boys.
Photo: © Jill
No related posts.
