Here’s what we know: The young are wrtiting more, and writing more outside of school. A Stanford prof says they’re writing with an audience in mind, that their writing is tailored to the audience, and hence is audience-appropriate.
Up to this point, there’s not much controversy.
But now we may part ways: Is the writing any good?
The prof says that’s not the question. Appropriate means correct.
The prof’s study is summarized here in Wired by Clive Thompson:
Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos-assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world.
The study itself is here.
Is there such a thing as good writing, recognizable apart from context, apart from audience?
More on the different kinds of writing, and context here. (Hint: You’ll have to go elsewhere for blog posts about Salma Hayek and zombies.)