THE ? OF QUALITY WRITING

How the level of student writing has declined since the pandemic

bye Laziza Talipova

Graphic by Austin Yuan

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.

is eventually led to writing papers online, and it detered 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 signi cant impact on how people compose and consume written words.

emails, instant messaging, and social media, to stay connected. As a result, the quality of writing has su ered, as more and more people are relying on informal language and abbreviations, such as “LOL”, “U”, “R”, and “BTW.”

“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 ur submitting something like essay form quality, u don’t want to do that because it just gives o an unprofessional vibe.” e paper has voiced their concerns with this issue as well. According to their reporting, early reading and writing skills were @ a 20-year low last fall, which the researchers described as “alarming”. Becuz of this, writing performance in the United States has dropped in 2019, according to national and international exam scores.

Many students have had to adapt to school remotely, which has meant that emails, books, and other written documents have become the primary forms comunication. is has resulted in a decrease in the quality of writing, as many students are more accustomed to a casual style of writing.

“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 signi cantly from before the pandemic,” e New York Times said.

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 fall, which the researchers described r of

“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,” e Washington Post said.

Sophmore 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 belives that although the abbreviations may be an accident, some students choose to show personality and unique characteristics through the diction choices made.

“Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading and writing skills they need to learn,” e New York Times said.