Lessons from My Students
I, like Karen, want my students to see themselves as writers. Right now, I’m neck-deep in grading my first batch of essays for the year, a writing reflection project that asks students to examine how technology has affected their writing. During class discussions surrounding this project, I have come to realize the extent to which my students are already writers: they spend alarming amounts of time texting, Tweeting, posting Facebook status updates, and even blogging, or at least commenting on blogs – about real issues, for real audiences (though not academic ones). Part of me finds this terrifying; we’ve all graded essays in which students slipped into text speak, failing to capitalize first-person singular pronouns and phonetically substituting numbers for words. But I have also come to see that some of the writing skills our students practice every day could easily transition to the college writing classroom. In the tradition of numbered lists offered by Kathleen and Deborah, below are a few of the lessons my students have taught me during this project:
- Social networks generate heightened audience awareness. Ask your students if they’ve ever posted a Facebook status that was misinterpreted or watched a single ill-advised tweet destroy a friendship. These are hard lessons in audience awareness, and they occur in a real-world context. Students are often very mindful of who sees what they post online; they know exactly how many followers they have on Twitter, and they’re eager to boost those numbers. They’re often Facebook friends with parents, former teachers, and potential career contacts, and they’re acutely aware of how their status updates will “play” for mixed audience groups.
- “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Shakespeare’s Polonius gave us a few pithy gems, and this is certainly one of them. Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters; most cellular plans limit texts to 160. These limitations do, of course, give rise to the kinds of shorthand that strike horror into the souls of writing teachers, but they can also encourage writers to eliminate wordiness. Students often write and rewrite tweets in an effort to convey complex observations within the character limit, and their goal is to make those thoughts worthy of re-tweeting. They’re experts in the nuances of hashtags, using these as efficient rhetorical devices to link their tweets to others that they see as similar in theme or content.
- They’re already joining conversations. One of the basic skills of academic writing that we struggle to teach in first-year composition is the art of “joining the conversation.” Many of our students are active blog readers, and they regularly comment on posts. Look at the comments section of a blog (this blog, for example), and you’ll notice that it’s set up like a conversation. It starts with people responding to the original post, but then some responders get responses, which can generate entirely new discussions. Many of our students are already adept at joining ongoing conversations on blogs or Facebook pages; we can capitalize on those skills and adapt them to academic contexts.
- Many of them hate the shorthand as much as we do. This was the lesson that surprised me most. In their reflections, many of my students wrote about judging others who posted grammatically incorrect status updates filled with spelling errors (intentional or otherwise) and shorthand as “lazy” or “uneducated.” Those students went on to say that, because they judged others so harshly, they were careful not to commit those same offenses, lest they be judged as well. In the forum of social networking, students recognize what’s at stake when they fail to proofread. We could exploit this consciousness by linking grammar and proofreading explicitly to the kind of self-presentation that happens online.
I’m not a trendy – or a particularly tech-savvy – teacher. I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account; I read very few blogs, and I usually comment only if there’s a prize involved. My students know far more than I do about social networking. Their essays made me realize that I could use the knowledge my students already have to start a conversation about writing that doesn’t insist on separating “papers for school” from real writing, and that acknowledges their expertise as writers. I look forward to seeing all of you at the Transitioning symposium, and I’m eager to hear what your students are teaching you!