March 05th, 2013

In my first day with the new professor, he told us that we had to create a blog and write about his classes, then he handed a (big) text and told that our first publish on the blog would be about this text.

So, the text talks about a professor, Arlan Hess, who was “complaining” about his students difficulties in writing complex sentences. This difficulty is because we are in the Twitter Era, which means that most of teenagers or users of social networks have to improve their written in 140 characters or less. The professor tells in the text, that his students were handling papers with same writing that they use on the internet.  I think, if the person is a good student, neither Twitter, nor Facebook or other social network will compromise the writing of nobody. They (should) know the difference between social media, papers from college or a corporative e-mail.

On the other hand, the professor was right when he said that when a student uses abbreviations in a paper, they reveal their inability to adapt messages. As I told earlier, if the person is a really good student, he won’t have this kind of difficulty. Sometimes, there is a “brainstorm” and the person gets confused when to write right and when to write “Internetish” just because he spent more time on the Internet. Reading a book is helpful. But it has to become a habit. Reading improves the writing and, consequently, the students of Arlan will handle papers a bit more intelligent.

Anyway, for language students, it is important to know how to customize a word or a sentence. Like the professor told, it helps the acceptance. But it mostly important, and not only for students, to know when use some kind of words. Abbreviate or not, the web language will not disappear. We just have to wait for people to improve their writing to get better and not use abbreviate words in a college paper, for example.