texting speak

In the September 09 edition of Wired, Clive Thompson has a short article in which he basically cites and agrees with Andrea Lunsford (a writing teacher at Stanford) that our students are more literate in the age of facebook and texting–they actually write (even if it’s just tweets) when they aren’t required to by a teacher.

The argument further says that the students understand the idea of audience more because of the “life writing” they do.

I find the argument intriguing, but I have one quick bone to pick. “As for those texting shortforms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.”

Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve actually returned a paper to a student and asked him to spot the error in line four. Even when looking for it, he couldn’t see the “you” is not spelled “u” error because he was so used to texting. While texting speak in academic writing isn’t rampant, it happens.

I’m upset that we would declare something a myth because one teacher didn’t find an example of it from the papers she collected at Stanford. This is a hasty generalization–the sample size is too small and is perhaps not representative of the college population.

Just saying.

The article is here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson