INFORMAL STYLES OF WRITING ON SCHOOLWORKS

UNEDITED SAMPLE FEATURE ARTICLE
By Jonah Aileen Oliva Reyes
IV - Enrico Fermi


Nowadays, the span of electronic communications has become advanced and very efficient reaching almost all the aspects of communication there is. A study shows that nearly all students do their school works through electronic messaging and social network postings. A survey done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing illustrates that among the 700 students surveyed almost two thirds rely on e-communication types of doing their assignments. Also, half of the students stated that they always tend to commit mistakes such as using capitalizations and punctuation marks at the end of the sentences. Nearly a quarter among the surveyed teens from ages 12-17 said they had included smiley faces and other emoticons in their coursework. More than thirty percent says they used text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laugh out loud” and “tom” for “tomorrow”.

Richard Sterling, executive director of the National Writing Project, an organization which aims to improve writing through teaching declared that it is not a worrying issue at all.

In case slang terms appear in academic works, Sterling stated, it is a chance given to the teachers to explain to students that those words; though accepted in some circumstances, are not allowed in schoolwork, treating them as formal writings. Also, he states, the English continues to develop considering that maybe, capitalization will not be important in the future as it is considered today.

I think in the future, capitalization will disappear," said Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his own teen-age son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.
The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points. Most teenagers do not think of their e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings as "real writing," the study found. More than half of the teenagers surveyed had a profile on a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace, 27 percent had an online journal or blog and 11 percent had a personal Web site. Generally, girls dominated the teen-age blogosphere and social networks.

Most teenagers write for school nearly every day, the study found, but most assignments are short. And many write outside school, on their own, although that varies significantly by race and sex.