Since I've already contributed to bellyaching about student writing assignments, it's only fair to point to a Wired article that says students are getting better:
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame....
Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
Maybe Twitter will help with composing 140-character thesis statements?
