Incommunicado Twitterers
February 1st, 2010 by ComputerBob
I saw it coming, back when I taught college computer courses.
I always told my students that it often doesn’t matter how much you know, unless you can communicate your knowledge to other people clearly and concisely.
To emphasize that point, I assigned each semester’s students to research a computer-related topic of their choice and write a one-page explanation of it that their mothers could understand.
In other words, I wanted them to Make Geek-Speak Chic™.
And their grade on that one assignment could raise or lower their final course grade by up to one full letter.
Sadly, every semester, I discovered that at least a couple of my otherwise most intelligent students were incapable of writing one coherent, grammatically correct, properly punctuated paragraph, let alone a logically organized one-page summary.
So I’d sit down with each of them afterward, to teach them ways to improve their writing. And then I’d allow them to resubmit their assignment just once, after they had improved it.
That was more than a decade ago, long before the massive popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter.
But apparently, in the past several years, the social networking phenomenon has made the written communication problem even worse.
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