Do you think the
effects of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media impact your writing in any
way? How does the fact that you have to condense your thoughts into a certain
number of words make your writing better or worse? Our research paper talks
about how social media can affect our writing skills by shortening our
sentences, making our writing informal, and impacting our spelling in a
negative way. Social networks are taking
the place of idle time, like reading and writing; instead of reading a book,
people are on Facebook or they are instant messaging. Our main question is does social media have a
negative or positive affect on writing as a whole.
The conversation we are presented with has become a
big issue in today’s society. With the
ever growing technology in today’s world, the way students are taught today has
made a complete turnaround. Not only do
students have access to many different technologies these days, but they are
available to them at a much younger age.
When young children are getting cell phones, smart phones especially, it
pushes them into social media. With the
convenience of having it right at their fingertips, they are getting twitters,
facebooks, tumblrs, pinterests, etc. at a much younger age than what we are
used to. With this happening, it is just
causing students to be turned away from literature as they are more distracted
with their social media.
However, with the growing technology, more and more
things are being put online. With the
much easier access, students can be browsing the web on social media sites, but
still have a reading pulled on a different tab.
Social media itself can be argued as literature. We read a heavy amount as we scroll through
our facebook and twitter feed.
Therefore, one can argue that even though social media distracts us from
the old style of literature, it replaces it with a more efficient way to get
our information fast. In a study
conducted in Great Britain in 2010, it is proved that social media is actually
helping students literacy.
“According to one of the studies, 49 per cent of young people
believe that writing is “boring.” However, students who use technology-based
texts such as blogs have more positive attitudes toward writing. Whereas 60 per
cent of bloggers say that they enjoy writing, only 40 per cent of non-bloggers
find writing enjoyable. “
“The
study also showed that students who write blogs or maintain a profile on a
social networking site tend to be more confident about their writing ability.
More than 60 per cent of students who blog and 56 per cent of students who have
a profile on a social networking site claim to be “good” or “very good”
writers, compared with only 47 per cent of those who don’t use online formats.
Having a blog also affects writing behaviour. Students who are active online
are significantly more likely to keep a journal or write short stories, letters
or song lyrics than those without a social networking presence.“
These
statistics show can be schoking to some.
Not everybody likes the way literacy is changing and seeing these
stastitics can throw them off because they want to believe that social media is
only making writing worse. As these
studies have shown, that is not the case.
If a student is reading and writing all day long on their social media
sites, they are being automatically exposed to reading and writing. Without such sites, who knows if they would
even pick up a book because they would be more ditracted by technology such as
video games where the student is not being exposed to literature at all.
In the article, the author discusses the difference between how he
wrote when he was a kid and how kids write now.
When he was younger he was writing in a journal to himself; it stayed in
his drawer and no one was reading it.
Today, that is so much different.
With the internet and social media, young students are able to write for
an audience. When they start out at a
young age writing for an audience, they can become more confident with their
writing and it will only continue to improve.
Another study we look at provides us with shocking evidence against
a norm of social media on literacy. It
is not uncommon to hear people saying that social media effects how we spell in
a bad way. However, if we take a look at
these reults, we can see otherwise.
“In
a recent study of 9-10 year olds results
show that there was a positive relationship between the use of ‘textisms’ (text
speak) and an improvement in spelling and overall literacy skills (Wood 2011). 114 children took part and were tested both
before and after the 10 week experiment.
Spelling scores were higher in a majority of students after having use
of a mobile phone and using text speak to communicate. “
Although
the results are shocking, the more it is thought about, the more it can make
sense. If i young student is on their
phone texting, tweeting, and reading what other people are saying, they are
exposed to literacy more than we are led to believe. The more they are exposed to it, the better
they will become with it.
This issue has a number of good arguments on both side of the
line. In the end, the way you perceive
it(good or bad) is all up to you. Some
are a fan of the ways literacy is being changed so they learn to adapt while
others continue to believe in the old ways.
Our
question has multiple answers. There are both positive and negative effects on
how social media effects are writing skills. According to a study by both The
University of Massachusetts and Boston College computers can help with writing
in many ways. Students who use computers for schools related tasks are often
more engaged then students who do schoolwork by hand. The simple fact that
computers give students automatic feedback helps them to improve their writing
skills. When you are writing an assignment by hand you can not see the spelling
and grammatical errors you have made, but if you are using a computer you can
use software like Microsoft Word to check your mistakes for you. Another study
conducted by The University of Massachusetts and Boston College showed that
students who use a computer to write on a regular basis have higher
standardized text scores than those students who do not use computers to write.
Although
social media may have some positive influence on one’s writing ability, social
media also contains negative influence.
Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterist,
and Tumblr are all very interesting, yet distracting; this can take away from
idle time like reading and writing.
Instead of reading a book or writing in a journal or diary, people are
on Facebook reading statuses or on Twitter expressing their opinions (in 140
characters or less). Facebook and Twitter
are breeding grounds for bad grammar and punctuation. People are too caught up in what they’re
saying to care about spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. When scrolling down my Twitter timeline, I
found these tweets from actual people that prove the fact that proper writing
etiquette is not used through social networking sites. According to Frank Re, “yeah you make me feel
like, I’ve been locked out of Heavennnn” (10/18/12 1:47 PM). Look at all of the errors in his tweet: he
failed to capitalize the first letter of this sentence (but he capitalizes
“heaven”), he put an unnecessary comma after the word “like”, and spelled
“heaven” with four N’s. Another tweet I
found, from Shaela Lewis, states, “Yu don’t hate me u hate how much u love me”
(10/18/12, 1:31 PM). Where to begin with
this tweet; she spells the word “you” as “yu” and “u”, and her tweet lacks a
comma after the word “me” as well as a period.
Even going through my tweets I found multiple writing errors. For example, I tweeted, “Anthropology y u so
expensive” (10/6/12, 4:08 PM). This
tweet contains multiple spelling and grammar errors, like the word “why” and
“you” being spelled as “y” and “u”.
Also, this sentence is missing a verb (“are”) and since I am addressing
the store Anthropologie (the store is spelled with an “ie” so technically I
spelled the name of the store wrong, too) there should be a comma following
that word. Social networking sites are
full of all sorts of writing errors, and writing repeatedly like this can
become habit forming and bad for your writing.
The topic we have researched on
effects of social media on our writing today is very relevant in today’s
society. Many of children, teenager and even adults have been impacted by
the outcome of social media on writing skills. The amount of individuals
logging onto social media websites is rapidly increasing, therefore making this
topic more insightful to many people today. We have found negative effects such
as it has made writing more concise. On websites such as Twitter there can only
be a certain number of characteristics to write and this causes students to not
write full out and get lazy in grammar and punctuation. Further research that
could be done on this question to get further conclusions could logging onto students
Facebook’s and Twitter’s to actually see what kind of effect these social
medias have had on their grammar. Also by researching and taking polls in a
certain area we can get a better understanding of how many people this research
project is really effecting.
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