There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed the other day, “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers.” I think it might make for good reading/discussion for English 516, where this basic question of “are computers helping students be better writers” often comes up. I like this passage from Jeff Grabill too:
“The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything,” Mr. Grabill says. “That’s utter nonsense.”
The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.
Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as “the new normal,” he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: “The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource.”
But I guess this does prompt me to think about/mention two things:
- My guess/gut feeling is that a lot of the expression students have about how they “like” to write more outside of school than inside of it has a lot more to do with school than it has to do with what it is they’re writing. I agree with Grabill about trying to give assignments in classes about real world problems, things that resemble conversation rather than academic, five paragraph, “there are three problems with x” kind of essays. But no matter what I do to incorporate these kinds of writing assignments into my courses, there is still all the apparatus of the situation. I mean, none of this is voluntary. I wouldn’t be doing these assignments and this teaching if I wasn’t empowered (and paid!) as a college professor, and my students wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t trying to complete coursework and a degree program. So there’s always going to be a division between writing students do for school and writing they do “outside of school” not because of the kind of writing but because of the situation of writing, which is school.
- Despite the headline, it seems to me that neither of these studies is actually trying to answer the “do computers make students better writers;” rather, both seem to be studying how students actually practice their writing in and out of the classroom with computers. Which is a good thing. My take on the “do computer technologies help make student better writers?” is that it is really an irrelevant question because it is what students and everyone else uses to write nowadays. If someone did a study and somehow was able to prove that people “wrote better” when they used a quill and parchment (or hell, just pens and paper), it wouldn’t make any difference because I think most people nowadays find using these older tools to be a pain in the ass.
And really, the stuff that Grabill is talking about in the part I quote isn’t about technology. You can teach a dreadful academic research paper kind of class in a computer lab, too.