Advertisement Gelatt recalls spending hours at the MIT library looking though various guides and books before finally finding the name in the New York Times index. It was a great feeling when Gellat discovered Webb was a Casey Jones fireman.
“It wouldn’t work as a hazing challenge for freshmen any more,” said Gellat, now a member of Viterbo University’s board of trustees.
That’s true. No one in their right mind would go though that kind of painstaking work to find a fact nowadays. They’d simply do a Google search for it.
But, is something lost in that simple maneuver? Is that reading and researching like Gellat had to do really important to literacy?
Local college professors talk about what they see in today’s electronic-age students who are accustomed to not only Google’s quick results but also online reading, e-mailing, texting, video, sound bites and other forms of electronic communication.
Word processing woes
A student of Susan Cosby Ronnenberg, associate professor of English at Viterbo, once wrote in an essay, “Congress cannot remain within its economic boudoirs.” It was an obvious spell-check error, substituting “boudoirs” for “boundaries,” that gave her and the student a good laugh, but one that would have been easily corrected though proof reading.
Today’s students are taught to write primarily though word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, that have limited spelling and grammar checks, said Richard Sullivan, chairman of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-
La Crosse.
“A lot of times students rely on that to do the work for them,” he said.
It results in consistent spelling and grammar errors that the computer doesn’t catch, homogenized writing among students and a lack of complexity in sentence structure, Sullivan said.
For instance, a sentence that is compound-complex will be tagged grammatically incorrect in Word when it is not, he said.
“Students see the squiggly green line, so they will restructure the sentence making it less effective and display less complex thinking,” he said.
Cosby Ronnenberg agreed the grammar check is set at a level for middle school and high school writing, rather than the college level.
That shifts and shapes the way we think about language, Sullivan said.
But Darci Thoune, assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing at UW-L, isn’t sure students make any more mistakes today than they would have before word processing programs. She added these programs have made the revising process much easier.
The Internet effect
The Internet also affects how students think about and use language, Sullivan said. The Internet provides access to small bite-size pieces of information often lacking in detail, he said. The ability to rapidly shift from one section of information to the next creates a different expectation about written language than reading an encyclopedia or other book, Sullivan said.
“I think a lot of students are bored by complex writing,” Sullivan said. “They want something quicker and more direct, which may or may not be a good thing.”
Cosby Ronnenberg notes that if something doesn’t catch a student’s interest right off the top, it is harder for them to read though it.
Thoune said she personally reads a lot of articles online and finds this can allow for in-depth reading.
Internet communication also allows communities of writers to correspond and exchange ideas more rapidly and with less interference than prior to the advent of the Internet, Sullivan said.
Sound bites and reading, writing
Cosby Ronnenberg began to notice several years ago that students’ spelling reflected more listening and watching than reading. For example, words such as “our” and “are” were confused. However, those problems aren’t as prevalent today, she said. She attributes that to her current students growing up reading Harry Potter books.
“I think that provided some kind of strange counterbalance,” she said.
On the other hand, the world of electronic communication gives students many opportunities to practice writing, said Cosby Ronnenberg. For example, students do a lot of low-pressure, informal writing on a day-to-day basis though mediums such as Facebook or e-mail, which helps with formal writing assignments, she said.
“Any practice they get with writing is useful,” she said.
Research made easy
The Internet is a huge resource for information. Traditional research using books has given way to more electronic forms of research, Sullivan said. The negative result is it is easy to use unattributed information from the Internet and therefore substitute shallow, inaccurate information for good sources, he said.
On the positive end, universities have libraries with research databases that have good, accurate information, and Google makes it possible for students to have much broader access to information than was ever possible before, he said.
“I think if students are using critical-thinking skills, then they will be fine with using Google and other search engines, but I don’t think any of those can replace academic databases that university libraries offer,” Cosby Ronnenberg said.
Cosby Ronnenberg and Thoune agreed students come in to their writing classes with a good grasp of how to evaluate Web sites and that knowledge has increased in recent years.
“We used to have to start with the very basics on how to evaluate Internet sources, but that has changed dramatically,” Cosby Ronnenberg said. “Most students come in knowing that Wikipedia is not a reliable academic source.“
Thoune said it’s an instructor’s job to teach students to be savvy consumers on the Web.
Another part of research writing is citing work. That has become easier with many academic libraries now offering software programs that format the works cited page for students if they type in the information, Cosby Ronnenberg said.
“I don’t think it helps them understand why certain details are emphasized in one documentation style versus another,” she said, adding that not every computer they use in the future will have these programs.
As for Sullivan, he personally prefers research in the pre-electronic age.
“I like the idea of going into a library and getting lost in my research … one thing leads to another,” he said. “I think the Internet provides the opportunity for the same discovery research, but in a different format.”
Text in essays?
It’s a rare event to see a student write text abbreviations such as “lol” or “2b” in a formal essay, Sullivan said, and the other professors agreed.
“Generally all it takes is me telling a student that is not OK in an academic essay, and they learn pretty quick,” Thoune said.
Plus, students use text-messaging differently. Some still insist on spelling out words in their entirety, Cosby Ronnenberg said.
Thoune said technology has provided students new ways to view the world whether a simple text-message, online reading or a hypertextual essays that provide links to related information throughout the essay.
“Students come to us with a good amount of technological literacy,” Thoune said. “To not play to those strengths, we are missing out.”
