facebook didn't exist when i was in high school, but newsgroups and email lists did. i noticed a difference, myself, going forwards from about grade 11.

there's a caveat. you'll notice i don't capitalize. i'm not very interested in conventional grammar; i'd actually argue it should be abolished in favour of a concept of interpretive grammar. there are certain rules that i systemically reverse on purpose. i probably wouldn't have developed these habits had i not spent so much time on the computer. on that level, the luddites have a point.

yet, the general idea that facebook makes people's writing worse is just flatly daft. writing isn't innate; we excel through practice. the more practice one gets, the better. is facebook somehow taking away that practice time?

the argument is maybe a bit better for twitter and it's business-focused character limit, but it's still hard to see how the silly and verbose could somehow reverse time spent actually writing.

unless one wishes to argue that kids are spending less time writing in their journals and more time on twitter? sorry, mom, but if your kid was going to do that then she'd be on livejournal, not twitter.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/facebook-has-transformed-my-students-writing-for-the-better/281563/