On Technology and the Teaching of Writing

From all the jails the Boys and Girls

Ecstatically leap—

Beloved only Afternoon

That Prison doesn’t keep

They storm the Earth and stun the Air,

A Mob of solid Bliss—

Alas—that Frowns should lie in wait

For such a Foe as this—

—Emily Dickinson

Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in our word-processing programs (so much that they’re quickly becoming a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed and even handwritten letters. And many believe our language is being perverted by the shortcuts (and concision nearly to the point of indifference) we’ve become accustomed to writing and reading in text messages and IMs. For example, if Emily Dickinson were writing today, the poem I've quoted above would likely be stripped of punctuation altogether and reduced to something like, “frm jail bfs and gfs leap and luv l8r to prty :-( w8 ttyl E,” or some such seeming nonsense.

For many teachers and writing pedagogues, this is a travesty, a torturous fact of modern life that we all must contend with and defend against in our classrooms. However, I would argue that we are at a moment in the history of the English language where the capacity for something wondrous is upon us. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been other wondrous moments in the evolution of human language, but there has not (and may not ever be again) a moment just like this one, a moment where the very fabric of how we speak and how we express ourselves through language has become so tenuous that every new textual utterance threatens to either devolve into gibberish or reinvent the very way we speak and write.

The evolution of written language is speeding up at an exponential rate, and this necessitates that we, as teachers (and particularly teachers of writing), reconsider the way we work with language in our classrooms. We can no longer be the staid old-school grammarians that taught so many of us how to write, nor can we simply dismiss or overlook the teaching of grammar entirely. Rather, we must think consciously (and practically) about how our student’s conceptions of (and contexts for) writing are changing, and we must approach the teaching of grammar in new and innovative ways.