Crosswell's Corner

Clive Thompson writes an interesting article in this month’s Wired magazine where he discusses the literacy habits of students.  I found some of his findings to be quite remarkable.  The study he cites throughout the article is the Stanford Study of Writing, which collected 14,672 writing samples from students over the course of five years. Here were the most shocking points from the article:

• "Young people today write far more than any generation before them"
• 38% of student writing takes place outside of the classroom
• The study "didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper" – granted the study was of Stanford students, not of your typical high school students

I thought that this quote was the most important one of the article:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

It is for these reasons that I have been advocating incorporating student blogging into the curriculum.  Sites such as blogger.com or edublogs.org give our free blogs to students that permit students to write for a wide auidance (each other, their parents, each others’ parents, the whole world).  It is my humble opinion that this would be best implemented on a school-wide level so that the students have only one blog throughout their high school career that they can become familiar with and personalize.  Assignments could be easily sorted through tagging for the teacher’s ease.  I am not suggesting that every assignment translate into blogging, rather I am simply proposing that having some assignments that incorporate blogging may encourage student writing.