Does online writing produce better writers? IMHO, it can, but hasn’t yet to any great degree.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh Keller asks: does the explosion of online writing via social networking sites mean that we’re developing a better generation of writers?

The long and the short of it is that no one knows. Students are writing a lot more, and to audiences about whom they care. On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs do not exactly seem to promote the kind of disciplined analysis that most good writing constitutes:

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.

The debate seems to boil down to whether more writing produces better writing. One researcher states, “People write more now than ever. In order to interact on the Web, you have to write.” But writing, on the one hand, for Facebook and, on the other,  to produce an analytic essay or a legal brief, is writing for entirely different purposes. Sometimes I wonder if the differences are like driving to a Friday night party and driving in the Indy 500 — skill at one does not necessarily translate into skill in the other. As one writing professor quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article points out,

[H]e spends more of his time correcting, not integrating, the writing habits that students pick up outside of class. The students in his English courses often turn in papers that are “stylistically impoverished,” and the Internet is partly to blame, he says. Writing for one’s peers online, he says, encourages the kind of quick, unfocused thought that results in a scarcity of coherent sentences and a limited vocabulary.

My own views on the effects of online writing on professional writing are mixed — it hasn’t been the benefit idealists hope for, but it’s an outstanding tool that, properly used, could be a tremendous benefit to producing a new generation of excellent writers.

On the one hand, I have encountered again and again in the past couple of years student efforts at professional writing that are so stylistically inappropriate as to make me cringe. I recently read, for example, an analysis of the jury system that read entirely like a People Magazine article, full of superficial quips and an endless series of references to examples obvious to everyone – the principal point of reference was the O.J. Simpson trial (which, incidentally, I consider an example of atrocious lawyering on the part of the prosecutors, not a failure of the jury system).

On the other hand, the internet is here, and we better get used to it, even if we are training lawyers or political analysts. Students write  a lot on social networking sites. As the article points out, “Students in [one] study ‘almost always’ had more enthusiasm for the writing they were doing outside of class than for their academic work . . . .” Moreover, online writing is “self-directed,” is “often used to connect with peers” and usually is aimed at a “broader audience” than is professional writing. One of the most interesting points to me as a legal writer is that online writing is “also often associated with accomplishing an immediate, concrete goal, such as organizing a group of people or accomplishing a political end . . . .”

These are all characteristics that quite plainly can be used to produce better professional writers even if they have not yet been used effectively to this end. I have struggled to exploit student enthusiasm for online writing. Two years ago, I created a class wiki directed at creating a brief writing check list. I did not consider the effort terribly successful. One year ago, however, I created (as the Chronicle of Higher Education noticed) a class blog to explore issues regarding copyright and fair use in connection with a legal brief the students were assigned to write. While the blog became almost entirely the product of my own work rather than that of my students, it was a huge success in producing better work product. The students were engaged in and argued about the blog, and that engagement and passion produced work that was far more thoughtful and disciplined than anything I could have imagined without the blog.

So does Web 2.0 produce better writers? If you think it does so merely because it makes people write more, no. But it is a tool that, properly employed, sure can help.