The Future of Writing

[2009]

Attention uni students: facebooking and twittering just may score you HDs.

In the September issue of Wired, Clive Thompson makes an interesting point about the future of the writer: “It’s not that today’s students can’t write,” he says, “it’s that they’re doing it in different places and in different ways.”

This new generation of writers produces more text than they might realise—what Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, calls “life writing.” She found that 38% of student writing takes place outside the classroom, but I’d venture to say that this number is even higher.

Consider the numerous platforms in which students form words: twitter, facebook status updates, facebook chats, facebook wall posts, myspace, AOL instant messenger, e-mailing, blogging, SMSing…the list goes on.  In a few years, it seems, almost every graduate will also have a degree in communications.

Thompson argues that purpose and audience are the most important aspects of writing, and that today’s young people have mastered the questions of why and for whom. But how else will wordplay on the web improve academic prose, creating a society of better, more efficient writers?

As Lunsford notes, considering audience is one of the most important aspects of good writing. And audience is perhaps the first consideration that young writers have today when it comes to status updates and blogging. When students have a purpose and an audience that cares (because yes, your friends do want to know what you thought of Inglorious Basterds, because why would they waste ten bucks on a movie that wasn’t any good?) writing isn’t so much of a task but more of a means of being social.

In fact, if people want to stay connected with their friends and family, if they want to be “in” with what’s going on in the worlds of the people they care about, they have to write—or at least read what others are writing.  So straight away, there is always a reason to write—everyone has a purpose, and that purpose can be to inform, to comment, or simply to ramble. In the world of social networking, your audience is your friends, and they usually care. So writing about how hungover you are, or how much reading you have to do, is always acceptable.

On facebook and twitter, character limits pose restrictions as to how many words you can use to say what you’re doing, where you’re going, what you think about something, or how you feel. This forces students to get their arguments across as concisely as possible, making for better and more efficient writing. Likewise, writing a thesis for an undergraduate essay requires a succinct statement, and a good one will take a position that others might challenge or oppose. With students updating their statuses anywhere from every few days to every few hours, their thesis writing skills are practiced almost daily.

In social networks, users compete with each other for time and space—if your status update, blog post or twitter feed is provoking enough, people will take time to not only read it, but to comment on what you’ve written. And isn’t that the goal of writing—to provoke, to inspire, to get people interested? Not only do you have to be more interesting than the all the other tweeters and facebookers out there, but you have to be timely. Posting a comment on a news story from two days ago won’t generate responses, because people have already moved on.

Not only that, but for every comment you receive on a post (on facebook), your post will keep re-appearing in people’s newsfeeds. The most feedback you generate, the more your writing gets published. “Three of your friends commented on Mike’s status,” the feed might read. Aren’t you now a little more inclined to read his status?

The World Wide Web is an incessantly up-to-date medium. If something major happens, you can rest assured that it will be posted online within minutes—even seconds. News travels fast, and opinions are developed quickly; if you want your voice to be heard in the cyber world, you have to generate your opinion, structure them into words and post them online as quickly as possible. What better way to train students for deadlines and due dates?

Nowadays, most students “write” from their computers. Gone are the days of papers and pencils; in fact, many students can type faster than they can write. Professors in lecture halls now look out to a sea of laptops and faces, not a swarm of moving pencils and bent heads. They hear the clicking of keys and the occasional cell phone, not rustling papers and erasers frantically rubbing.

When composing essays, today’s students have immediate access to every tool imaginable: dictionaries and thesauruses enhance vocabularies, encyclopaedias and online books provide sources and spell checking and online grammar manuals allow for on-the-spot editing. These tools are making for smarter students, better writers, and a much more efficient and timesaving writing process.

Consequently, an entire essay can be restructured in seconds. Students don’t see eraser marks, crossed out words, arrows and brackets moving sentences around, carrots with inserted phrases and circled spelling mistakes. Instead, second and third drafts are merged into one, as entire paragraphs are copied and pasted, sentences are cut with one click and spelling errors on Word are fixed instantaneously without the student even realising it.

All in all, the increase in writing and the way in which students are doing it is fantastic news. Not only will we get stronger writers, but the potential for stronger public speakers is also great. Status updates are announcements, declaring facts, stories and opinions to the cyber world. Comments on controversial posts are often in the form of short speeches. Young people are increasingly using social networks to discuss politics, current affairs, music, movies and philosophy; as such, they have no choice but to express themselves in words.

So uni students—keep it up. While your professor may not care how many VBs you drank last night, or why you think Hilltop Hoods are no good, somebody out there probably does. And if you can convince your friends that Hilltop is overrated, who’s to say you can’t convince your professor that a Wordsworth poem communicates the power of nature to mitigate solitude?