A lot of people decry the Internet’s effect on language, noting how lazy people are about grammar and spelling online, and how this seems to be spilling out into other areas beyond the Internet. However, they may just have that backwards: it could be that people are becoming more literate because of the Internet, and that the bad English you see might be the result of people writing regularly for the first time in their post-college lives:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I think they have an excellent point. As inane as Twitter can be, its 140-character limit forces one to be clear and concise–so much so that I have been toying with the idea of making students run sentences through Twitter before including them in essays. And several years ago, I wrote a blog post about how arguing on the Internet is a great (albeit painful) way to sharpen your argumentative skills. (That post is now included in a published college reader–almost ironic evidence to the point made here.) And I have always believed that the Internet is a subversive new media type that expands not just free speech, but the range of speech as well.

The point about audience and shaping one’s message is also important; this is something writing teachers try to impress on students, but have trouble because in school, the audience is usually just the teacher and no one else. It is hard to find a writing environment for students which is more varied than that.

There is no doubt that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, bad influences on language and people’s use of it; but it may be that the overall effect is far more positive than anyone expected.