176 CHAPTER 7 | FRom SummARy To SynTHESiSwouldn’t be writing any words anyway, that’s going to
improve their very low-level skills.”
But he spends more of his time correcting, not inte-
grating, the writing habits that students pick up out-
side of class. The students in his english courses often
turn in papers that are “stylistically impoverished,”
and the Internet is partly to blame, he says. Writing
for one’s peers online, he says, encourages the kind of
quick, unfocused thought that results in a scarcity of
coherent sentences and a limited vocabulary.
“When you are writing so much to your peers,
you’re writing to other 17-year-olds, so your vocabu-
lary is going to be the conventional vocabulary of the
17-year-old idiom,” Mr. Bauerlein says.
Students must be taught to home in on the words
they write and to resist the tendency to move quickly
from sentence to sentence, he says. Writing scholars,
too, should temper their enthusiasm for new tech-
nologies before they have fully understood the impli-
cations, he says. Claims that new forms of writing
should take a greater prominence in the curriculum,
he says, are premature.
“The sweeping nature of their pronouncements
to me is either grandiose or flatulent, or you could
say that this is a little irresponsible to be pushing for
practices so hard that are so new,” Mr. Bauerlein says.
“We don’t know what the implications of these things
will be. Slow down!?”
Deborah Brandt, a professor of english at the
university of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the
recent history of reading and writing, says the growth
of writing online should be seen as part of a broader
cultural shift toward mass authorship. Some of the
resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she
says, is based on the view that writing without reading
can be dangerous because students will be un tethered
to previous thought, and reading levels will decline.
But that view, she says, is “being challenged by the
literacy of young people, which is being developed
primarily by their writing. They’re going to be read-
ing, but they’re going to be reading to write, and not
to be shaped by what they read.”warns that educa-
tors should temper
their enthusiasm for
blogging and other
online writing (paras.
32–35).Has he studied this?Another scholar
reaffirms a finding in
the Stanford study:
that electronic media
represent a cultural
shift that educators
must learn to accept
and adapt to.Really, people are not
shaped by what they
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