Kids Improve Writing Online

aelfric35 writes "Ben Franklin advised his son not to allow schooling to interfere with his education. Even though many have disparaged the effects of IM on schoolchildrens' prose, some kids are actually becoming better writers by participating in online communities. Henry Jenkins writes in MIT's Technology Review about how some kids are gaining writing and editorial experience far beyond what their schools can offer by participating in Harry Potter fan fiction forums (sorry about the alliteration)."

Comments

Writing better?

[derrith]

I'm a senior in high school at the moment, and I see a lot of kids who have become disgusted with misspellings and abbreviations. They make it a point to be sure that correct grammar and spelling is utilised, whether online or in the real world. There is a backlash against IM idiocy. However, grammar is still poor, as most kids are not taught the rules of the english language, I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.

Re:Writing better?

[yintercept]

I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.

The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.

To make matters worse, the new style grammars that have been place for the last half century rejected teaching sentence structure. For important philosophical reasons, you are not supposed to know about the predicate and object in a sentence. Me, I learned about helper words and action words, and am clueless about real English grammar.

mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[dohadeer]

I think anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time looking through the Harry Potter fanfic community would realize that this is not a place you want your children freely roaming about or practicing their writing skills. That is not to say that there aren't plenty of wonderful writers out there who write really amazing stories. Some of these stories are full of real emotion and demonstrate the skill of a number of talented, undiscovered writers. Rather, I'm simply saying that an unsupervised child in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction might wonder how exactly Severus Snape managed to get pregnant with Draco Malfoy's baby, and why exactly Ginny Weasley became so much of a harlet.

Having been exposed to both sides of the HP fanfiction, and having rejected both of them for my own reasons, I would have to say any parent that would encourage their child to join in this type of community has certainly not been exposed to it in its entirety and would be sorely mistaken to assume it is a safe place for children to roam.

Oh please...

[KDan]

For every online community that may improve the writing of a handful of the kids who participate to it, there are 10'000 online communities where everyone (mostly native english speakers) spells like english was their fifth language that they're still learning. That's like saying that watching the debilitating cartoons on the usual channels improves kids' imaginations and creativity. It's a complete pile of arse.

There is a tiny minority who are improving themselves despite the apalling effects of the absence of grammar and spelling education, but pointing at those and saying "oh, look, the system works!" is just plain stupid.

Daniel