During the pandemic, families came together and discovered new hobbies along the way. Schools leaned on online platforms and teachers found methods to cope with classes virtually. This eventually led to writing papers online, and it deterred the focus and quality of writing for many students.As we have seen, the pandemic has shifted many of our daily activities online, which has had a significant impact on how people compose and consume written words.
“As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in a variety of grades are missing writing benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic,” The New York Times said.
The New York Times has voiced their concerns with this issue as well. According to The New York Times, early reading and writing skills were at a 20-year low last fall, which the researchers described as “alarming”. Writing performance in the United States was dropping in 2019, according to national and international exam scores.
Before the pandemic, there was already a trend of casual writing due to the rise of texting and social media. But the pandemic has accelerated this trend, as more people are relying on text-based communication, such as emails, instant messaging, and social media, to stay connected. As a result, the quality of writing has suffered, as more and more people are relying on informal language and abbreviations, such as “LOL”, “U”, “R”, and “BTW.”
“Frequently seeing to/too written as 2, or people written as ppl, might mean that these kinds of spellings could start to creep into students’ formal writing,” The Washington Post said.
Sophomore and Skylight editor, Grayson McFarlan, has seen and edited many pieces of writing for Trinity’s Skylight.
“It’s been pretty interesting editing,” McFarlan said. “Of course, there are some mistakes that are just weird. It’s like students don’t have a spell checker on their documents…we’ve seen plenty of mistakes and abbreviations, it’s crazy.”
McFarlan also believes that although the abbreviations may be an accident, some students choose to show personality and unique characteristics through the diction choices made.
“Sometimes, students like to play with the personality of characters in their writing,” McFarlan said. “But if you’re going to try and get published, or if you’re submitting something like essay form quality, you don’t want to do that because it just gives off an unprofessional vibe.”
Many students have had to adapt to school remotely, which has meant that emails, books, and other written documents have become the primary forms of communication. This has resulted in a decrease in the quality of writing, as many students are more accustomed to a casual style of writing.
“Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading and writing skills they need to learn,” The New York Times said.
The fact that many individuals multitask while writing has made written communication even more problematic. Writing emails and other papers while doing other things, such as scrolling through social media or watching TV, is a common practice. Because multitasking increases the likelihood of errors and misunderstandings, the quality of writing has decreased as a result.
