By Lucy Ferriss, Chronicle of Higher Ed
Online-Writing-Jobs1A new Pew study is out, reporting the effects of the digital revolution on student writing. It’s a broad study with dozens of both thought-provoking conclusions and what strike me as flawed equivalencies. For now, I’ll focus on just two points. The first is that I learned of the study through an article on Atlantic Wire titled “The Internet Is Making Writing Worse.” Well, dog bites man, I thought. But I clicked on the link to learn that the Pew study reaches no such conclusion. It opens with the statement, “A survey of 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers finds that digital technologies are shaping student writing in myriad ways and have also become helpful tools for teaching writing to middle and high school students.” How did we get from that opener to the Atlantic Wire headline? Well, the reporter focuses on what he calls “academic atrocities” that the Pew study supposedly reveals, “including using informal language in formal papers and plagiarizing” and having “trouble reading long texts.”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/07/29/our-favorite-scapegoat-the-internet/
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