Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore

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Writing: It Ain’t the Same Anymore

5/7/2008

By Trent Batson

Who can do that? Or, better, why do that? In real life, a novice learner trying to speak to an expert about her business would be rebuffed; it would be a demonstration of presumption. But those are the kind of assignments we’ve often given in writing class, thereby convincing a series of generations that they are not good writers.

The Value of Replacing the Essay with the E-mail Form

E-mail has attributes that should be tantalizing for the academy:

- A choice of infinite possible audiences, primary, secondary, tertiary at first and then other potential audiences over time. Since audience and purpose are the key writerly criteria for good communication, the “To:” line in an e-mail alone is worth a couple of weeks of instruction.

- And, how do you construct the “cc:” line and the “bcc:” line?

- The subject line can be as simple as a topic, but in the e-mail firehouse, it is better thought of as an executive summary that includes purpose. You need to catch the attention of your intended audience knowing your e-mail may be one among a hundred in the inbox.

- The diction in e-mail writing often shifts from a hybrid oral form and then back to a formal written form, sometimes in mid-sentence. How do you choose which diction to use with whom?

And so on. You get the point. E-mail is the ordinal form of this age. Higher education is adapting in small measure by including more courses in more different departments about writing for the Web or in electronic discourse. But in the collective conscience of higher education, the reference form when talking about writing is still the essay. And that’s too bad because we could teach writing principles so well by using e-mail as the standard current form, and we’d be teaching a form that students do anyway.

The essay is a design challenge (state your thesis in the first paragraph, limit yourself to five paragraphs, and conclude by summing up) whereas e-mail is a communication challenge. Designing a good e-mail is even more difficult than designing a good essay, but it’s more enticing and it’s suited to the writing landscape we are in now.

And, Now, the Conclusion to this Blog, er, Essay

Is “real writing” the context-less essay or is real writing what we all do during a large part of each day as we work at our computers? We wonder if the Pew study is coming to the right conclusions: Maybe it is not that teens are eroding their essay-writing skills, but that education has not evolved with the culture.

Trent Batson, Ph.D. has served as an English professor, director of academic computing, and has been an IT leader since the mid-1980s. He is currently a Communication Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT. batsontr@mit.edu