I think those people haven't spent much time staring at all that blank and unexplored white space on pages that they are attempting to fill with their writing. Often it is through writing that people discover just what it is that they think about a particular topic. For example, when I started this blog entry, I did not know where I planned to go with this post. However, I know now that I am writing this as a plea to writing teachers everywhere.
It is the fad in writing pedagogy to eschew traditional research papers in favor of online writing forms such as blogs and facebook posts. But the problem with using these forms as a main staple for the teaching of writing stem from the same problems that beset online reading.
If you haven't steered away from at least one overly long article online that you could have and would have easily read offline, please raise your hand. You are, I believe, a rare breed. I think most of us tend to dread the thought of reading long articles filled with terms straight from long-latin-looking-word-academic-ese on the white glare of the computer screen. So we opt for quick, easy, reading. We want short paragraphs and easy sentences when we read online, even if our offline tastes head towards the run on sentences that Dickens fans love.
So it is with writing. Students writing for blog entries are not going to have to struggle with the difficulties inherent in trying to structure a complex sentence, how best to structure their arguments, and how to draw readers in to a longer work.
I really hope that writing teachers will use online writing as sparingly as jelly. The meat of the writing program needs to remain as it has. I do believe that the pedagogy of writing needs some serious overhauling, but that overhauling has nothing to do with technological change in my book, but rather in developing a clearer language for communicating to students how specific tasks in writing are done, and in developing more clearly targeted exercises that isolate specific skills.
Though student interest may be leaning towards online writing, their interests must be balanced by the necessity of learning writing the old-fashioned way. Students who are truly interested in writing online well must realize that their writing must benefit from wading through traditional research papers and projects, which teach efficiency in writing, structuring arguments, the effective use of humor, and how to include not only informal logically based arguments, but how to weave in personal stories and arguments of emotion.
There simply isn't time in online writing to be able to effectively practice these skills. Nothing can replace writing a paper, printing it out the old-fashioned way, reading it aloud, and the red-pen editing process.
The best way to explore the white space, is to have plenty of white space room to explore. Twitter feeds and cell-phone tweets cannot offer the limitless spaciousness of the blank page that students need to learn to navigate.
