Teenagers’ lives are filled with writing. All teens write for
school, and 93% of teens say they write for their own pleasure.
Most notably, the vast majority of teens have eagerly embraced
written communication with their peers as they share messages on
their social network pages, in emails and instant messages
online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell
phones. Parents believe that their children write more as teens
than they did at that age. This raises a major question: What,
if anything, connects the formal writing teens do and the
informal e-communication they exchange on digital screens? A
considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry
that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when
he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic
communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought
– the sentence.” They are concerned that the quality of writing
by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic
communication, with its carefre