The English language has become tragically infected, purists fret these days, with “whateverism.” Sent that e-mail with typos? Whatever. Speckled the school paper with texting shorthand? Whatever (make that WE). Rambled on about something nobody else would ever care about? Whatever.
In this digital age, all it takes is a Web connection to get published, a cellphone to send a letter to the editor, a blog to tell the invisible world how much you love your cat – and judging from the mass of ever-growing words out there, we have a lot to say. But how well are we saying it?
Ever since the send button clicked on that first sloppy e-mail, digital technology has been accused of ruining the quality of writing. Fearing for the future of proper prose in a whorld overrun by texting, an early critic, John Sutherland, emeritus professor of modern English literature at University College London, declared texting to be "drab shrinktalk": Texting as a dialect, he wrote in a column in the Guardian, "is thin and - compared, say, with Californian personalised licence plates - unimaginative. It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand."
Clearly, Prof. Sutherland is no fan of the shorthand texters use – GOYHH, they might snipe back at the language scholar (as in, Get Off Your High Horse) – but more than a few worried academics share his gloomy view, suggesting that literature, as we know it, is doomed by pulpy Web-based prose and careless punctuation. Naomi Baron, a linguist at American University in Washington, D.C., credited with the term “linguistic whateverism,” warned that the more we write online, “the worse writers we become.”
But take heart, dear scholars. A new study from California's Stanford University has produced some reassuring news: Young people may not be writing so badly after all, and, in fact, their prose is evolving in some promising new ways. They write more on their own time, their school essays are longer, their voices are more attuned to the people who will read their words. They know better – at least by university – than to drop text-speak into a class paper.
In the Stanford study, undergraduate students submitted pieces of writing over the course of five years, including everything they wrote for school. Their contributions amounted to 15,000 samples – blog postings, journal entries, e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, honours theses, scripts and an astonishing amount of poetry.
Only 62 per cent of the writing was done for class assignments – the rest of the samples were other items the students submitted voluntarily. On their own time, the students – half of whom were pursuing science or engineering degrees – were remarkably prolific, says Andrea Lunsford, director of Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, who spearheaded the study.
Much of the personal work was intended to be active, to make a case or argue a point. For this generation, she says, “writing is performative. It gets up off the pages, walks off and does something.”
While students at Stanford may be a select group, Prof. Lunsford has also completed a similar study by amassing a random collection of essays by first-year university students across the United States. In a sample of more than 800 papers, there was not an LOL (or any other text lingo) to be found – though other English professors say they do crop up.
And her research showed that over the past century the length of student essays has increased dramatically – from an average of 162 words in 1917 to 422 words in 1986 and 1,038 words in 2006.
In addition, while 25 years ago, the most common assignment was a personal narrative, first-year students today are most often assigned papers requiring a thesis and sources – and consequently, Prof. Lunsford concludes, more “higher-order thinking skills and complexity.”
