Does Social Media Affect Student Writing?

In the last years, the social media has taken a significant part of our lives by simply bringing communication to a “whole new” level. For that reason, I started wondering its consequences in a student’s life, since they are in a development phase of reading/writing. I read articles that showed me opposite perspectives about how social media can influence a student’s writing development, and they really got my attention. The bottom line is that we, as adults, are incapable of keeping students away from the online world, and because of that, it would be rather interesting to study its consequences. In the same vein, my debate is “does social media help or hurt student writing?” That uncertainty has been on my mind since I first thought about …show more content…
As reported by Campbell, the exposure to an informal and carefree online environment is, unfortunately, leading students to an unconcerned style of writing. For instance, students are forgetting about punctuation rules, capitalization, and even spelling. In accordance with the author, it has been noticed that those teens are having a hard time while switching from a colloquial context to Standard English. I personally understand that this can happen; being that young, students are likely to adapt themselves with the ambiance they are. Nevertheless, I also believe that parents, the ones responsible for their children, could be administrating these students’ time on the social media and hence requiring of them a little more maturity on what they post. Therefore, it is relevant to keep in mind that Simmons made a good point on his article by mentioning how influential it is for a teenager to open his or her heart while using social …show more content…
Analyzing both articles made me think of what was actually urgent: the student’s own performance in life, as a whole. Since it is a fact that the internet has become essential in every way, we might as well just learn how to work with it and gain from it, not lose. My point is that students have to start seeing their own posts on their social media as a real piece of writing, and that will only happen if they truly understand that every public expression is valuable, and therefore, it needs to be written as such. As a critic, I also recognize that being in the online world can be considered as a refuge from the reality, and because of that, students may think it is ok to misspell words, use slangs, and leave punctuation and grammar rules behind. That being said, I suggest that students learn the purpose of social media as a constructive and powerful communication