"Academic Writing" vs. New-Aged Media

I have had bad experiences (well at least never a good one) with “academic” writing. When I first signed up for this class I thought I was going to hate it. But I had to take it for a pre requisite for the Business School so I was just going to have to grin and bear it. Before I knew anything about the class I thought we were going to have to write a few 5-7 paragraph, boring papers but I was pleasantly surprised. So far this class has allowed me to write/type relatively freely. We write two two-page papers a week and I am much more comfortably doing that. I don’t have the pressure of having two or three papers that make up the whole grade for the class. I don’t feel like I need to use an outline (which is where I normally get frustrated). I feel that I can write what I want to and get feedback from the teacher and from my peers.

New media has brought about typing. Some people even take laptops to class to take notes, which was probably unthinkable 10 years ago. With the introduction of computers and typing I think that my writing skills have suffered. I can type faster than I can write so when I am writing I think faster than I write and screw up words. For example, when I am taking notes in class and writing down a lot I screw up letters and get words all mixed up. My notes are messy and the words barely recognizable when reviewing. So that would definitely be a huge bonus with typing on a computer. Plus you have one of the greatest tools in MS Word, the spell check.

A bad consequence of new media and writing is that people don’t really know how to write “traditional academic” papers anymore. But then again, maybe there isn’t a great need for “traditional” papers. My dad used to judge papers for scholarships for high schoolers 10 years ago and he would always say how the essays were horrible and that kids don’t know how to write anymore. And I could guess that what he said was right because I suck at “academic” writing (although I know I’m just one case). I don’t think that I have enough creative style to be a really good writer. Maybe I have been desensitized through too much television and video games. Who knows?
Another consequence would be the lack of writing technique that people may have lost (never really learned) from using a computer. Talking on instant messengers, people have learned to abbreviate and most of the time never using appropriate punctuation or capitalization. I have noticed this in my writing and typing skills. I find myself making abbreviations and using poor grammar that some people may not understand.

But I really don’t see any need for talking about bad consequences because I really don’t think they matter anyway. I can’t imagine computers dieing off in the next 50 years (or ever) so talking about consequences may be a mute point. I think what our society needs to work on is incorporating the good qualities of actually writing into computing. I think that some “new-aged” teachers are already starting to do that (a.k.a. this class and other articles/movies that we have read/watched in class). I think that meshing new media and English curriculum is necessary because I believe that the merge will happen anyway. We need to act know before our writing literacy has totally vanished.