Thursday, August 27, 2009 Writing used to be one of the hardest
skills for learners to practice on their own outside of class,
back in the Dark Days before email and the Internet. Options
were basically limited to keeping a written journal or
exchanging letters and postcards with a pen pal and the
occasional “letter to the newspaper” classroom assignment. Now,
however, opportunities to freely practice writing abound:
keypals, social networking sites, bulletin boards, chat rooms,
Web sites where customers leave reviews and comments, blogs, and
so on. So . . . writing skills must have vastly improved, right?
Well, perhaps a certain degree of fluency has. However, what we
also have is a host of new problems. You’re teaching a class the
difference between two, too, and to, and then they come in
wanting to spell all of them 2. I think there are two basic
problems: the models students see and the attitudes they can
pick up towards writing. Poor Writing Models Abound Online
Certainly the level of writing they could