July 9, 1999

Today I spent a little time weeding out my email. I subscribe to a list-serve for English teachers that has been unusually active over the past 36 hours. They're talking about what we know, don't know, or think we know about how people actually write.

So that's where my mind has been all day. While chomping away at my Grape Nuts, while waiting for the new bed delivery guys to show up, while driving out to the mall for bedding stuff, while laying around on the floor trying to get the cat to come out of the closet (unsuccessfully), I've been thinking about how and why people like you and me actually write.

I say "actually" because we all know that there are things we do in school that don't seem to qualify as actual writing. They don't flow from our own interests and needs but from some external demand. Then again, in the "real" world we often have to write what we wouldn't write if we didn't have to (memos, school assignments, business letters, resumés...)

I do know this: the internet and my web site have stimulated me to write in a variety of forms for a variety of purposes. The Web has a voracious appetite for language. Whether, or how, anyone reads it or not is another matter.

And this thought came to me while munching on my Subway turkey on wheat no cheese footlong dinner: the internet is the site of more authentic teenage writing than any other arena, including the classroom. At least for now, if you're going to communicate online you've got to be a writer.

I've heard people complain about the way kids write online - with no attention to correcting spelling, typos, punctuation , or sentence structure. Of course it's true; kids are practicing all kinds of bad habits online - but it may also be true that they are meeting this technology head-on and using it in natural, authentic ways which are appropriate for themselves and their audience. This writing surge with its peculiar idioms may be changing the future of the language itself.

I'm about to step off the deep end here. So I'll preserve us all by saving these thoughts for another time and place. But, in all honesty, such are the things that clutter the brain of an English teacher on a bright summer's day.