OMG, ppl luv writing, nu study sez.

September 15, 2009 • 12:46 pm • POSTED BY brendan quinn

“No one reads anymore.”

Copywriters hear some variation of that phrase at least thrice daily. And while we occasionally drift into the enticing pastures of overly garrulous, wildly pretentious prose–uh, I mean write too much–it should come as welcome relief to anyone who pecks the home row keys for a living that people, in fact, are reading and writing more than ever.

This new Wired article, citing a new Stanford University study, states “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.” The author Clive Thompson makes a point that perhaps the good old days weren’t so good for people writing, because “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.”

Sure, old farts–myself included–have derided the lol-tastic world of text and IM speak, but at least people are organizing their thoughts in the written form–albeit an evolving form. And even the oldest codgers among us must concede that we now occupy a world where folks actively consume the majority of their information; discovering news and reading things online is far more involved than passively sitting in front of a TV screen or radio.

Of course, people have more options than ever, so they can quickly bail on any content.  So the good news is that people will read. They just won’t read crap.