Texting is negatively impacting college students’ writing

Key factors:

“as a result of she needs to have enjoyable”

This was an eighth-grade pupil’s response to a query I posed in a studying response project tied to the play, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The query requested was: “Why does Anne cover Peter’s sneakers?” Technically, the coed is right–Anne hides Peter’s sneakers as a result of she is bored and uninterested in being cooped up within the small house she is pressured to cover in. The scholar understands the underlying motives driving the character’s conduct right here. However there are some issues with this response.

Discover the lacking preliminary capitalization, the dearth of closing punctuation, and using a sentence fragment. These errors usually are not random; they’re very explicit. They mirror the shortcomings of communication through texting. This was not an remoted response, however one instance of a sort I noticed over and over all through the college 12 months. These college students suffered from “Texting Illness.”

That was the joking time period that my fellow English academics and I got here up with to explain what we had been seeing. Our joking masked an actual concern. Was early publicity to texting crimping our college students’ means to write down appropriately? To interact within the vital pondering course of that underpins the power to write down?

Texting’s outsized affect

In response to a latest Stanford Drugs examine, the typical age that kids obtain their first telephone is 11.6 years of age – fifth or sixth grade. As anybody with preteens can inform you, texting and group chats tackle outsized significance and time dedication within the lives of many kids at that age. Texting rapidly turns into the dominant house for written communication of their lives. Not surprisingly, for a lot of of our eighth-grade college students, how they texted was bleeding into how they approached writing within the classroom.