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A large number of teens feel that language more appropriately used in e-mails, text messaging and online postings has made its way into their school work, according to a new survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. About 50 percent of teenagers said they write something for school nearly every day. More than one-third reported having a written assignment several times a week. Most survey respondents, 73 percent, contend that using computers and text-based communications did not influence their formal writing.
With the results of this study on teens and writing you may be interested in our recent research in this area. My colleagues and I have been studying the impact of "textisms" on writing. In a study completed in late 2007, we asked a sample of 678 pre-teens, teens, and young adults to tell us how much they use certain textisms in their daily written “online communication” and then asked them to write a formal letter to a fictitious company. We then used a standard scoring rubric used to assess writing quality (and did not deduct points for using textisms in their letter unless it affected the rated quality) and found some staggering results:
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1. The use of “contextual textisms” such as smilies, using special characters to indicate feelings (e.g., *hugs*), or using all capital letters to suggest strong emotions WERE NOT RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR FORMAL LETTER.
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2. HOWEVER, the use of “language-based textisms” such as acronyms (LOL), shortened words (tht instead of that), and removing apostrophes (wont instead of won’t) WERE NEGATIVELY RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING. In particular, those who used more of those textisms produced worse writing samples than those who your fewer even after controlling for gender and age!
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We had hoped that this was not going to be the case (there is some scant data from England suggesting the opposite) and are now exploring it further with a larger sample of subjects and two writing samples – a formal one and an informal one – in the hopes of gaining more clarity on the impact of textisms in online communication on writing in the classroom.
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For more information on our work please visit www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com.
Dr. Larry Rosen
LROSEN@CSUDH.EDU
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1. The use of “contextual textisms” such as smilies, using special characters to indicate feelings (e.g., *hugs*), or using all capital letters to suggest strong emotions WERE NOT RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR FORMAL LETTER.
------------------------------------------
2. HOWEVER, the use of “language-based textisms” such as acronyms (LOL), shortened words (tht instead of that), and removing apostrophes (wont instead of won’t) WERE NEGATIVELY RELATED TO THE QUALITY OF THEIR WRITING. In particular, those who used more of those textisms produced worse writing samples than those who your fewer even after controlling for gender and age!
-----------------------------------------------
We had hoped that this was not going to be the case (there is some scant data from England suggesting the opposite) and are now exploring it further with a larger sample of subjects and two writing samples – a formal one and an informal one – in the hopes of gaining more clarity on the impact of textisms in online communication on writing in the classroom.
--------------------------------------------
For more information on our work please visit www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com.
Dr. Larry Rosen
LROSEN@CSUDH.EDU
