by Adil Shahid
Adil is a Communications major living in Fall River, Massachusetts. Adil enjoys writing and reading, and for a long time he kept a daily journal where he vented about his days to the blank pages. He feels that many students his age have lost touch with writing and reading simply because schoolwork has tainted their views of it. He hopes “that people do not lose sight of their creative outlets and passions and hold on to them dearly.” Adil and his classmates created a survey about student writing habits because they felt it was “important to see where other peers were at in their writing careers.” In addition to reading and writing, Adil is interested in addressing the new problems that college students face in an era of digital distractions.
From a very young age to adulthood, reading and writing are skills that naturally stick with us. Being that a good portion of our lives are spent in an academic setting, honing these skills is essential to almost every student. From mastering the five-paragraph essay to learning how to sort through database articles in hopes of composing a research paper, as students, our writing has naturally evolved over the course of our academic lives. Eventually one’s writing habits, process, and theories begin to be set in stone whether or not you even enjoy writing in the first place. How often do you find yourself writing for either your own fulfilment or academic purpose? Whether you find yourself working best under pressure days before your assignment is due, or space out the work equally in the week , this all becomes curated into one’s own unique way of writing.
My writing process came to be in a very different way than most. While I certainly can’t lie and say most of my writing process was shaped in highschool through academics, a good chunk of it has come from my own interest in personal writing in my free time. Growing up with very strict Middle Eastern parents I found myself confiding into daily journal entries to express my frustrations. This journal developed into more than an angry thought collection, but rather into a daily check in with myself. Whenever I would write these short pieces I would always sit down at a desk in a well lit room – but not too bright. Most of the time I would require complete silence to the point where I could even hear a pin drop. However, sometimes, a nice calm instrumental beat would be nice to accompany me, especially in the dark hours of the night. These quirks I developed in my own personal writing style carried over when it came to writing an academic piece. The calm state of mind I curated when writing these journals helped me to feel less burdened with the assignment I was doing and approach it from the view of a student doing his best possible work and not from the view of a stressed student who would rather be doing anything else than writing. More importantly, I feel as if my personal writing helped me develop my own voice in my writing. Humbly speaking, a common compliment I have gotten on my writing pieces is that they always sound like me. I genuinely believe that my personal writing helped me to foster my own style and not sound so bland and monotone in my work. Unfortunately in comparison to my peers, I seemed to be the only one who did any sort of personal writing in leisure time. Was this because I was the only one who seemed to enjoy writing for what it is and what it can accomplish? Or perhaps my peers were writing in a different manner other than pencil and paper in a spiral notebook. In this day and age those fingers must be typing away at a keyboard on a laptop or a digital touch screen on a smartphone. But are they typing away in their Google Document or on their Twitter feed?
Analyzing writing processes is nothing new and has in fact been done on a much larger scale than what me and my fellow classmates have been able to do. In “The Writing Lives Of College Students” by Jeff Grabill, Stacey Pigg, et al., they take a closer look at analyzing the writing behaviors and practices inside and outside of the classroom. From the pool of 1366 students many of the authors findings along with the WIDE Research Center are certainly not surprising by any means in today’s standards despite this research being done in 2010. Seeing that the most written genre for students is text messaging goes along with the pattern that there is this wideshift spread of conforming to writing in a digital genre (Grabill, Pigg, et al., 5). Contrast this data with Carol Berkenkotter’s piece “Decisions & Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer and Response of a Laboratory Rat: Or, Being Protocoled” in which her primary goal was to analyze the literary writing process of only Donald Muray, who was an English Professor at the University of New Hampshire. Through the use of audio tapes and physical observation Berkenkotter was able to piece together Murrays planning, editing and revising process and see how intricate one’s process can really be. When breaking down the transcripts of Muray’s audio of him thinking out loud , Berkenkotter sees how one’s initial writing plan led to multiple different sub plans (Berkenkotter, 161).
With technology advancing almost yearly and social media becoming even more of a time consuming distraction in our lives our writing habits and process have become affected by this whether we want to accept it or not. In this digital age rather than trying to adapt to our new landscape of smartphones and laptops instant access to almost anything we have instead seemed to be consumed by it. Thus, it is important to see how, if anything, has our writing processes and ideologies hold up in this new era when social media and technology is thrown into the mix.
Methodology
In order to complete the task of analyzing current day writing habits by college students I, along with my fellow peers in my professor’s College Composition I course, created a short 10 question survey, titled “Students Writing Habits Survey”, in order to gather data and have the means to fulfill our goal. Many of our questions were influenced by the aforementioned studies. As Grabill & Pigg did with their questions, seeing what genres students are writing and how they are composing them can lead us closer to speculate what mindframe students find themselves in when they sit down to compose a piece. But it is also important to see the process itself and everything in between as Bekenkotter alluded to in her extensive survey process in which she accounted for every single detail and step of Murray’s writing process. Thus, questions that ask students what challenges they face on an assignment or how much time they spend writing a five-page essay can help us piece together what that student’s writing process may look like on the surface. Going further than just looking at one’s process, it is also important to see how students feel about reading and writing as a whole. Questions asking the respondents to rate themselves as a writer, asking what they do the most when writing or even if they enjoy writing are important pieces of data to have in order to see to make correlations between the actual writing process and the respondent themselves. For instance, a pattern I noticed in our own “Students Writing Habits Survey” was if a respondent considers themselves to be an under average writer or if they hate writing it is likely that they will have difficulty with drafting the actual assignment itself. With those two influences in mind along with multiple peers’ inputs a 10 question survey was made through Google Forms on November 25, 2019 and was kept open until December 1, 2019. The “Students Writing Habits Survey” was distributed, via a link to Google Forms, to either first or second year college students that were currently taking a writing intensive course or a composition course. This range meant that we had a realistic view of the age bracket of the respondents being somewhere between 18-20 years old. Other than this, except for asking the respondents what their intended major at the moment was, no personal questions or names were asked in order to be ethical and unbiased. In total there were 102 student respondents giving us a large enough data pool to see distinctions, patterns, and discrepancies in the data we collected.
Results
As a first year college student myself, the data my peers and I gathered was not surprising to me in the slightest. Procrastination is a very common habit that students often do when they have a lot to do on their plate in order to temporarily alleviate any feelings of stress. So to see that 56 of the respondents (54.9%) claim that they leave all the work for the assignment the night before the deadline shown by figure one is not shocking. This may also correlate with how 39.2% of respondents claim that the biggest challenge they seem to face when doing their assignment is not getting distracted.
What these two pieces of data show is that students are not able to put in 100% of their efforts and ability into the assignment because of time. As full-time students our plate seems to often be full leaving little room for anything else. The problem is that academic work is not the only thing we as students, and human beings, have to deal with. Working part-time or full-time jobs are often common with students to have pocket money or to pay their tuition/housing bills. Some students may have extracurricular activities, sports or clubs that they participate in after classes in order to be involved in their communities. Like everyone, family obligations such as babysitting or running an errand with a parent takes precedence and only puts back writing that five-page paper farther down on your to-do list. Some students may have to deal with all of the above at the same time, and somehow juggle the academic responsibilities of assignments for five different classes, while just dealing with life. Being a student myself and having to help my dad at his job on just the weekends, this idea of students not having enough time is certainly a reality and is a common theme I found not just in these pairs of data, but throughout the survey. The way we spend our time seems to be directly linked to our writing process and how we feel about writing as a whole.
The way we feel about writing while being influenced by our academic work is certainly not just limited to that influence alone. We are constantly reading and writing on a daily basis a lot more than we realize. The different headlines and articles we see plastered all over our social media platforms, and the hundreds of texts we send our friends, are all a form of reading and writing we do just in a different context. Or at least that is what I had assumed, until I saw the statistic that despite spending a lot of time on their phones 54.9% students do not consider it to be reading or writing as shown in figure two. My best guess for this is that on social media we are not actively engaging with what we are reading and instead just skimming through what we see, hence why not many people seem to consider their time spent on their phones “reading.”
This statistic piqued my interest, other than Netflix or Youtube, surely whatever other online activity done requires some form of reading or writing, just not in an academic sense. But what really got me intrigued is this statistic is in direct conflict with another question previously asked on the survey in which respondents were asked to report what they read the most (Displayed in Figure 3). Again, not shocking to anyone, but social media posts once again ranks the top with 81 students (79.4%), followed by text messaging with 78 (76.5%), with the last being books with 30 (29.4%) of what students read the most. (Survey
Most likely students are doing one of these two things primarily on their smartphones, it is often very rare to see someone go on social media on a laptop over their phone, unless they happen to be distracted in class. Phones seem to be the medium of choice for social media due to how convenient and seamless it is to take out your phone and instantly open an app, rather than take out your bulky laptop wait for it to load up, then load up Google, proceed to type in your desired website of choice, and wait for that to load as well. Despite respondents claiming these are their most read genres, they completely contradict this statement (as shown in Figure 2) when the majority claim that the time spent on their phone is not “reading or “writing”; but as shown here it clearly is. But why is that? It could be for a number of different reasons, but being a student myself, I believe that since the prominent introduction of social media we have classified “reading and writing” to only be concerned with academic work since that is what we are used to doing in the first place. Another reason I found to be plausible is that when we are on social media, primarily, we are not reading, at least in an academic sense. With social media we just read a couple of sentences and then scroll past to the next thing in a matter of seconds. With academic reading we are forced to slow ourselves down and absorb the text and sometimes even to go back and reread certain portions if they don’t make sense. In short, these different nuances in “social media reading” and “academic reading” each have their very own distinct mindsets, to the point that we don’t even consider the other one to even be reading. As an active social media user, I also find myself skimming through sentences and headlines very often. Thus, it is easy to see how we consider this other form of rushed reading to be its own stand-alone thing. But what does this have to do with a student’s writing process? I believe that the mindset we apply to our social media reading is also being applied to our academic work, or is at least interfering with it. Perhaps this is the reason why we as students may struggle with longer forms of academic reading; we have become so accustomed to the skimming we do on social media.
From the survey we have established that students have difficulties finding the time or to even complete their assignments in a timely, efficient manner to produce a quality work, and that students spend a lot of time on their phones (primarily on social media) but do not consider it reading or writing in the context we are most accustomed to. Has the introduction of social media pulled students that far away from reading and writing in the traditional sense? The answer to that is yes, but it might not be our fault. Again, as shown in Figure 3, books and news articles ranked the lowest in the genres read by students. But once again, this contradicts another piece of data in our survey, represented by Figure 4, showing that 53.9% of respondents stated that reading is something they enjoy doing in their free time.
Figure 4 conflicts with Figure 3; if what this piece of data claims is true, then wouldn’t the percentage of books and articles be higher up on the list? Certainly with this question it should be made clear that “reading”, in this context, was meant to refer to books, and not social media posts. However with our findings, respondents do not seem to correlate reading with social media, creating once again another gap in our findings. This pattern is again seen in another set of data in Figure 5, when respondents were asked the type of writings they do. The top result for 80 respondents (78.4%) was texting, in contrast with creative and personal writing being at the bottom with 31 (30.4%). Yet in another question, respondents were asked what they enjoy most about writing, (shown in Figure 6) and the top responses were: getting to be personal/creative and being able to express emotions.
So we see that students enjoy reading, but they do not choose to do so. We see that students enjoy getting to be personal and emotional in their writings, yet creative/personal writing ranks the lowest. Perhaps these contradictions again correlate to the earlier claim that we, as students, do not have enough time to focus on our academic work, nevermind have enough time to partake in our own leisurely reading and writing. But as the previous data shows, we certainly seem to have a lot of time to spend on looking down at our phone screen.
Conclusion
All of the data presented from the “Students Writing Habits Survey” shows a lot of similar patterns, despite seeming to be flawed on the surface in its data, especially towards the end. However, all of the information seems to be pointing in one direction; we as students are slowly becoming disconnected from the joys of reading and writing can bring while being further connected towards our smartphones. This in turn translates into our writing process, as we are becoming less and less distant from the practice of writing itself, we are not bettering ourselves as writers. It seems that we have latched onto social media so much that we have begun to let go of other things that can hold just as much fun and enjoyment. The drop off of physical mediums, such as books and news articles, have all been replaced by social media and Facebook articles, which arguably does not give nearly as much knowledge as the former does. In the end we are all guilty of this, as much as I would love to admit that I read self-help books about mental well being, the time I spend on Twitter and Instagram vastly outweighs the time I spend reading physical print material. Depending on who you ask, some people may find this to be horrific, and others may just see it as the shift into a more technology integrated world. Personally, for me, I think that finding a balance between physical and digital medium is necessary. Especially with technologies such as A.I. developing, who knows if from a decade from now we will be writing our own papers and not some automated program. Technology should be of aid to us, but only to a certain degree in which we are still in control and responsible for the works we produce.
In this day and age everything can be accessed almost instantly through just a few clicks or swipes on our phone. Reading a new book or writing a personal piece, on the other hand, is something that can’t be done instantly. It requires time, which is something that we seem to have very little of these days. The fact that we have become spoiled in this digital ecosystem of almost instantaneous access to everything has spilled over into our everyday lives, both in our academic lives and out. It means that we have become rather impatient and hasty, we want everything now, just like social media will give us instant news updates constantly. Unfortunately, some things can’t be done hastily in order to produce a quality product, and that includes one’s writing process. Every step must be done with a plan and purpose, driving it ultimately towards a final draft.
So how can this data be used to make a statement on a student’s current writing processes based on the data we have gathered? While we didn’t do anything to the extreme like Bekenkotter did, and go record students while they plan and revise their writing pieces, since that would take much more time and effort to do, in the short time frame we did this survey. But the patterns we have been able to see from the data provided by the respondents can certainly be of similar effect. In short, it seems that our writing processes are very rushed and not being brought out to the fullest it could be. Whether this is because of real life distractions or the inability to put down our smartphone screen, it seems that the problem we have is that we are too distracted, primarily by social media. Social media not only seems to be a hindrance in the actual writing process itself, but it also seems to be stripping us away from our roots of reading and writing, not only in the academic context, but also for leisure. Rather than reading a book for fun, we tune to Facebook and skim through the article headlines. Rather than indulge in a personal narrative on our downtime, we would rather spend the time to think of the best Instagram caption for our posts. Not only as students, but as human beings, we need to become better at limiting our time spent mindlessly on social media and more at what truly matters. As our lives are already busy enough with many responsibilities it is important to save time where we can. Cutting down our social media time can easily give us the extra time needed to be more productive and at least not have to rely on all-nighter to finish a big research paper due the next day.
Works Cited
Berkenkotter, Carol and Donald M. Murray.. “Decisions & Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer, and the Response of a Laboratory Rat: Or, Being Protocoled.” College Composition and Communication, vol 34, no. 2, 1983, pp. 156-172.
Grabill, Jeffrey, et al. “Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students.” The Writing In Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center, 2010, pp. 1-14.
ENGL 101 College Composition, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Prof. Brittanie Weatherbie Greco. “Students Writing Habits Survey.” Google Forms Survey. November 25, 2019 – December 1, 2019.