This article from the New York Times make me reluctantly acknowledge that Twitter may be earning its place in the world of written communications. Imagine if Twitter could produce poetry in a genre akin to Haiku. And imagine if Twitter could be used to teach students to write a great sentence. That would be a great leap forward, as students undertake writing the good essay.
(by Andy Selsberg)
I’ve been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.