No smiley faces in term papers, please

University of California San Diego Provost Don Wayne was reading a student essay recently when he stumbled over the expression LOL.

“I can never remember what it stands for,” said Wayne, who began teaching composition to college students in 1969.

He jotted a note in the margin about the inappropriateness of colloquialisms and abbreviations in academic prose and added it to his growing list of frustrations about student composition.

For decades, the quality of student writing has been one of the most common complaints – and debates – on college campuses.

Professors have long lamented that students can't spell and that their sentences are riddled with grammatical errors. Some complain about the writing being too informal, disorganized or inarticulate.

Technology and the prevalence of texting and social networking have led Internet terms such as LOL (“laughing out loud”) to creep into academic writing.

Is college writing actually getting worse?



I feel the same - the quality of writing has gone downhill markedly. Just take a look around the internet for proof of this.

Some writers lament that even the advent of computers and word processing have had a negative impact. Writers used to hand write and really toil over polishing their work. Now, with word processors a lot of writing that should probably have been revised considerably is being submitted as is, after little more than a spell check.

And then of course we have writing that should never have been submitted for publishing at all, like that of Dan Brown.