Educação pode mudar sua vida

Instant messaging and e-mail are creating a new generation of teenage¹ writers, accustomed to translating their every thought and feeling into words. They write more than any generation has since the days when telephone calls² were rare and the mailman rounded more than once a day.

Some grammarians fear the rule-free nature of online correspondence - not to mention use of teen code, such as shortening "you" to "u" and typing "ttyl" for "talk to you later" - will flow into their students' formal³ writing. But more and more teachers are concluding that kids' comfort with language actually might improve their writing, if that interest can be exploited in the right way.

"These kids are very aware of the power of the written word," said Gloria Jacobs, who is writing her doctoral thesis at the University of Rochester on teenagers and instant messaging. "They have this fluency with writing online. They are practically attached to their keyboard, and I think that will help their writing skills."

More than half of teenagers and younger who have access to the Internet at home send e-mail or instant messages at least once a week, according to a study by a California research firm and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Many kids spend hours each night sending messages to friends and strangers. In the process, they are creating a new social world online, one that often excludes parents. That has brought with it well-known worries about online predators and concerns that children spend too much time on the computer, at the expense of schoolwork, sports or socializing face to face.

The positive side, researchers and teachers say, is that e-mails presents a new chance for teenagers to develop some skills needed for effective⁵ writing - learning to pick their words and tone carefully to communicate their message.

Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, has researched college students' electronic messaging and found that many consider abbreviations babyish. Younger children, she said, "try to show that they are smart. One way to do that is to come up with clever abbreviations and use acronyms that others may not know."

What kids might not lose, however⁷, is an intuitive understanding that writing has a purpose and an audience. Kids learn that how they write will determine whether their meaning is received correctly, the researchers said.

"Writing is about communicating with others. This is a very important insight to learn. So often in classrooms students fail to understand that they are actually writing for someone", said David Bloome, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University and the president of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Students also love writing online, seeing it as recreation rather than schoolwork. That opens up possibilities for teachers to exploit the medium. "For a while, people were not writing anything," said Barbara Bash, the director of the Maryland Writing Project (where she works with public school teachers from across the state to improve writing instruction). "Now, people are actually seeing words on paper. And that's good."