Texting is negatively impacting students' writing

Texting is negatively impacting students’ writing

Time Stamp: June 30, 2023 5:09 AM
Source Node: 2155333

Key points:

“because she wants to have fun”

This was an eighth-grade student’s response to a question I posed in a reading response assignment tied to the play, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The question asked was: “Why does Anne hide Peter’s shoes?” Technically, the student is correct–Anne hides Peter’s shoes because she is bored and tired of being cooped up in the small apartment she is forced to hide in. The student understands the underlying motives driving the character’s behavior here. But there are some problems with this response.

Notice the missing initial capitalization, the lack of closing punctuation, and the use of a sentence fragment. These errors are not random; they are very particular. They mirror the shortcomings of communication via texting. This was not an isolated response, but one example of a type I saw over and over again throughout the school year. These students suffered from “Texting Sickness.”

That was the joking term that my fellow English teachers and I came up with to describe what we were seeing. Our joking masked a real concern. Was early exposure to texting crimping our students’ ability to write correctly? To engage in the critical thinking process that underpins the ability to write?

Texting’s oversized influence

According to a recent Stanford Medicine study, the average age that children receive their first phone is 11.6 years of age – 5th or 6th grade. As anyone with preteens can tell you, texting and group chats take on outsized importance and time commitment in the lives of many children at that age. Texting quickly becomes the dominant space for written communication in their lives. Not surprisingly, for many of our eighth-grade students, how they texted was bleeding into how they approached writing in the classroom.

Alexander Slagg, Middle School English Language Arts Teacher, Illinois

Alexander Slagg is a middle school English Language Arts teacher in the Chicago suburbs. He is also a freelance writer and editor focused on education technology. He became an educator after a long career in corporate marketing and publishing.

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