As Clive Thompson noted in Wired magazine in 2009, “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 . . . , they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.” Times have indeed changed. Digital tools have ensured that writing is not only important for school, but it is also essential for most jobs and (thanks to texting and social media) is a key part of social life for most people—a way to share information with everyone from close friends to total strangers.

Uses of social writing

Social connection today involves so much writing that you probably write more out of class than in class. In fact, social writing has opened doors for writers like never before. Writing on social networking sites allows writers to get almost instant feedback, and anticipating responses from an audience often has the effect of making online writers very savvy: they know the importance of analyzing the audience and of using an appropriate style, level of formality, and tone to suit the online occasion.

Writers on Twitter, for example, compose in short bursts of no more than 140 characters. By tagging content, tweeting at groups and individuals, and pointing toward links, they can start discussions, participate in ongoing conversations, and invite others to join in. Here are two representative tweets from the Twitter feed of Stephanie Parker, a college student whose interests include technology and Korean pop culture.

In these tweets, Stephanie shows a keen awareness both of the audiences she is trying to reach on Twitter and of two common purposes for this kind of informal writing—to seek information (in the first tweet, about foods to fight off a cold) and to share information (in the second tweet, about her view of a popular Korean drama, with a link so readers can check it out for themselves).

Like Stephanie, many young writers today are adept at informal social writing across a range of genres and media. You may not think consciously about the audience you’ll reach in a Facebook post or a tweet or about your purpose for writing in such spaces, but you are probably more skilled than you give yourself credit for when it comes to making appropriate choices for your informal writing.

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Strengths of your informal writing

Of course, informal writing is not the only writing skill a student needs to master. You’ll also need to move back and forth between informal social writing and formal academic writing and to write across a whole range of genres and media. Take time to reflect on your informal writing: What do you assume about your audience? What is your purpose? How do you achieve a particular tone? In short, why do you write the way you do in these situations? Analyzing the choices you make in a given writing context will help you develop the ability to make good choices in other contexts as well—an ability that will allow you to move between social and academic writing.

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Video Prompt: Lessons from informal writing