In a recent study at a Norwegian university, researchers found that 40% of students have lost the ability to write handwritten texts. Turkish professors also have similar experiences with their students who belong to Gen Z.
That is the realization: As IGN Brazil reports, members of Generation Z are losing the ability to write by hand and express themselves clearly. These are skills that humanity has possessed and passed on for 5,500 years.
In an article on the Turkish website Türkiye Today, professor Nedret Kiliceri talks about how even university students lack knowledge of basic writing rules. The students were born into a digital world. You lack any practice in writing handwritten texts:
Students’ writing is either slanted downward or upward, and their handwriting is often illegible. Students used to be more used to writing with pen and paper, but today they are exposed to screens and keyboards from an early age. As a result, their handwriting suffers, especially in secondary school and university.
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Gen Z only writes single sentences, no longer paragraphs
How do the problems manifest themselves? In addition to the difficulties of putting texts on paper, there is also the problem that young people lack the knowledge to formulate more complex ideas in texts.
The professor explains: Students avoid long sentences and no longer write meaningful paragraphs. They prefer individual, stand-alone sentences to paragraphs that bundle together coherent sentences. Students would come to university without pens and would use keyboards for everything. The professor sees this as an influence of social media:
Students today prefer to convey basic information in just a few words. You try to summarize ideas in less than 10 words
Thanks to social media, Gen Z is used to expressing themselves briefly
How do the students see it? A student from Turkey who was interviewed sees the problem in the way school works. She says that since elementary school they have only written tests, but never essays unless absolutely necessary.
Social media has its own language, everything is shortened and expressed with emojis.
Another student adds: She used to write a lot, but now she hardly writes at all. And skills that are not used simply atrophy.
What does the study say? In a study by the Norwegian University of Stavanger, 585 students from 33 schools were examined. 40% of students have lost the ability to write texts by hand as a result of digitalization.
However, there is also good news: the ability to summarize concepts in less than 10 words has increased. We deal with other problems of Gen Z on MeinMMO in this article: Gen Z is currently facing two major problems, one of which they cannot solve without help