An article from Wired magazine provides an alternative viewpoint to the idea that the advent of the internet has been bad for writing.  According to a study by Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford, student writing has actually improved because they’ve been forced to write more than ever before.

“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.”

What do you think?  Has use of the internet improved your writing?