From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

kEllER | WHETHER THE inTERnET mAkES STudEnTS BETTER WRiTERS 171

would usually adopt a personal tone and more or less

ignore the prompt. “I got away with it,” says Mr. Otut-

eye, who graduated from Stanford in 2006. “Most of

the time.”

The rise of online media has helped raise a new gen-

eration of college students who write far more, and in

more diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But

the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both

for the future of students’ writing and for the college

curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more

engaged and more connected to an audience, and that

colleges should encourage students to bring lessons

from that writing into the classroom. Others argue

that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing hab-

its and have little relevance to the kind of sustained,

focused argument that academic work demands.

A new generation of longitudinal studies, which

track large numbers of students over several years,

is attempting to settle this argument. The “Stanford

Study of Writing,” a five-year study of the writing lives

of Stanford students — including Mr. Otuteye — is

probably the most extensive to date.

In a shorter project, undergraduates in a first-year

writing class at Michigan State university were asked

to keep a diary of the writing they did in any environ-

ment, whether blogging, text messaging, or gaming.

For each act of writing over a two-week period, they

recorded the time, genre, audience, location, and pur-

pose of their writing.

“What was interesting to us was how small a per-

centage of the total writing the school writing was,”

says Jeffrey T. Grabill, the study’s lead author, who

is director of the Writing in Digital environments

research Center at Michigan State. In the diaries

and in follow-up interviews, he says, students often

described their social, out-of-class writing as more

persistent and meaningful to them than their in-class

work was.

“Digital technologies, computer networks, the

Web — all of those things have led to an explosion in

Sums up two

opposed points of

view on the debate.

Goes beyond Haven

to cite an additional

study at Michigan

State that reached

similar conclusions as

the Stanford study.

3

4

5

6

7

Additional evidence 8

that supports the

Stanford study.

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