Facebook For The Better By Andrew Simmons Summary

“ Facebook Has Transformed My Students' Writing—for the Better” was written by Andrew Simmons, a high-school English teacher and this article really impressed me on how social media influence students’ writing. Mr. Simmons claims that Facebook made many of his students especially young men better writers and they become more open to writing emotionally. Although I agree with this point, I believe it's still controversial.

According to Mr. Simmons, social media is very helpful to improve students’ writings, especially young boys for the following reasons. In social media, boys can post what they really want to say, like they share their personal stories and express their true feeling about something, which they wouldn't feel as comfortable

Simmons that writing in social media can encourage people to write emotionally, I cannot accept his overriding assumption that social networking can actually improve student’s writing skills. First, I don’t think what they write and post on social media are related to what we write in school. In college, most of the time we write many academic writings and research papers, which requires a high level of formality, we need to write them in a very formal and well-organized way and we need to consider every word choice and grammar problems in order to make it better. By contrast, in social media, people can write very informal and interesting and it doesn’t need any writing skills. They don’t need to consider too much and they can just post for fun. It’s a really relaxing process, it also means that this will do nothing to help us with our writing. Instead, if students write in this way for a long time, they may write their formal papers in a more casual tone, it will greatly hurting how students conduct their academic writing. Second, as the author said, the internet is actually a really bad neighborhood. On Facebook and Twitter, students humiliate, jeer, and shame one another and they leave some bad comments on links. If they read and write too much about these bad comments, in this way, they may develop some bad writing habits and their writing style will become aggressive. It will lower their writing level and the destroy the quality of their