The Peak

Social media is not making us dumber

By David Proctor

Last week, the blogosphere, twitterverse, and newsobrick were ablaze with discussion of the declining quality of Canadian undergraduate students. The flurry of activity was sparked by a story on the Maclean’s On Campus news blog; apparently, a growing number of students are incapable of properly expressing themselves in the English language.

The Maclean’s article leaves the impression that this issue is particularly pronounced right here at our own university. SFU’s director of academic advising, Rummana Khan Hemani, is quoted as saying that students are commonly submitting documents including words such as “cuz” and “:-(” to her office; Paul Budra, SFU English professor and associate dean of arts and science, tells Maclean’s that he commonly receives papers ignoring rules as simple as those governing the use of apostrophes.

And who would know about the writing skills of SFU students better than the professors and officials that are reading the documents they write? The article points out that 10 per cent of SFU students are not qualified to take the required writing-intensive courses and must take foundational writing courses first.

Budra blames this on the fact that Canadian primary schools do not teach grammar, which is a perfectly reasonable assessment; the B.C. education system never gave me any more than a cursory explanation of what a comma is usually used for. It is ludicrous that a university English professor would need to teach these concepts.

But the Maclean’s article doesn’t seem to be fully satisfied with this explanation, and the dozens of articles about the same topic that appeared on alternative sources shortly afterward don’t either. The Canadian Press republished the Maclean’s article under the headline “Students failing because of Twitter, texting and no grammar teaching;” other news sources have followed suit, using headlines such as “Social media groups blamed for low literacy with young people” (Edmonton’s iNews 880).

This social-media tidbit is included in the Maclean’s article, though only in the form of a brief quote from Joel Postman, author of a book about harnessing social media for business purposes. With all due respect to Mr. Postman, it’s highly revealing that this quote comes from someone who wrote a book about social media rather than from a university professor.

It’s certainly true that 10 per cent of students entering SFU are not qualified to take writing intensive courses; what neither Maclean’s nor the outlets rebroadcasting their findings mention is the threshold of qualification. This statistic actually indicates that these students have English 12 (or equivalent) grades between 60 and 74 per cent.

Does this mean that youth literacy is declining because we’re spending so much time on the Internet? Does it mean that constant tweeting and texting is somehow crushing our ability to write formally?

No, it doesn’t. More likely, it means that SFU’s large international student population — roughly 11 per cent of undergrads last fall — is largely composed of individuals hailing from non-English speaking countries; I would expect that is also true of a large part of the domestic student population. SFU prides itself on its international character, as I think it should, but everyone should recognize that linguistic barriers are part of the international package.

Maclean’s is misrepresenting the problem. Yes, there are a lot of students lacking grammar education or who study in a second language, but this is not the same as idiots writing papers with titles like “Ghana suffers cuz of imf :-(.” Students who hand in such things should fail their assignments, and I suspect that they do. Maclean’s has not shown me any compelling evidence that students using a voice more suited to Twitter in their academic writing is a trend, let alone an epidemic.