Why Declining Literacy Panics Over Awkward Student Writing Miss The Mark
I’m halfway through a lukewarm turkey sandwich at my high school lunch period when the viral post pops up on my feed. The screenshot of crumpled notebook paper has just one sentence typed out: “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” The caption reads, “Proof literacy is falling apart. Kids can’t write a basic sentence anymore.” I snort into my cold coffee, get mayo on the screen of my phone. I know this sentence. I know who wrote it.
It was last fall, 10th grade English, my standard Monday warm-up. I tape three vocab words to the whiteboard by the door every week, kids have five minutes before the bell to write an original sentence with all three, just to get their brains going. No grades, no pressure, just playing with words. That week’s words were silhouette, extraordinary, gauche. A lot of kids wrote boring, safe sentences: “The silhouette of the tree was extraordinary, not gauche at all.” Mia turned in that line.
Mia sits in the back row, always has a half-colored sketch of a woman in traditional dress sticking out of her notebook, wears scuffed platform Docs that she paints different colors every month. I didn’t mark it wrong. I just wrote in the margin, “Cool idea—what image were you going for here? I want to understand.”
After class she hung around by my desk, twisting the strap of her backpack. She’d binged a Frida Kahlo documentary over the weekend, she said, was working on a painting of her for her art class. Frida’s dresses weren’t anything like the other artists wore, she said. They were big and bright, and some people thought they were too much, too weird. “Silhouette means shape, right?” she asked. “I wanted to say the shape of all her clothes was weird but cool.”
There it was. She’d learned the word the week before from a TikTok about art history, remembered it, grabbed it for the warm-up, just mispositioned it. She wasn’t illiterate. She was trying out a new word.
This is what all those “declining literacy” hot takes miss. They yank a single sentence out of context—off a warm-up, off a first draft, off a kid’s quick text to a friend—and hold it up as proof that an entire generation is losing the ability to write. But writing isn’t about getting every word perfect on the first try. It’s about communicating an idea you care about.
If you’re a parent or a new teacher, the first small shift you can make when you see an awkward, wrong-sounding sentence from a kid is pause before you correct it. Ask them what they meant. That’s it. It takes 30 extra seconds, and it changes everything. I don’t circle every error in a low-stakes writing assignment anymore. I mark the lines I love first, then put a question mark next to the parts that don’t make sense, and ask for clarification. If you’re reading your kid’s homework and see a messy sentence, don’t jump in and say “that’s wrong, fix it.” Say “I don’t quite get what you mean here—can you tell me about it?” Nine times out of ten, they have a clear idea, they just fumbled the words getting it out.
The second thing: let kids mess up. Low-stakes writing is supposed to be awkward. Those five-minute warm-ups I do? They’re not supposed to be publishable. They’re a playground. If you correct every single mistake your kid makes in their personal journal, or a text to you, or their first draft of a book report, they stop taking risks. They stop trying new words, because they’re scared of getting it wrong. Mia never would have written that full Frida essay if I’d embarrassed her for that first messy sentence, or marked it as a failure on the spot.
Three weeks after that warm-up, Mia turned in her personal narrative for the end-of-unit project. It was about going to a Frida exhibit with her grandma, who grew up in Texas in the 1960s, painting murals in the community center that got painted over because the city said her “casual Mexican clothes” were inappropriate for public art. Mia wrote, “Frida’s silhouette hung on the wall next to a photo of grandma’s mural, both extraordinary, both a little gauche to people who wanted art to be quiet.” She used the word perfectly, and she tied it to her own family’s story. That’s the kind of writing that matters more than any perfect, error-free generic sentence. That’s literacy.
People have been saying literacy is declining for as long as I’ve been in education. When I was a student in the 90s, it was “texting is ruining writing.” Before that, it was TV. Before that, comic books. The truth is, kids today write more than any generation before them. They write fanfiction, they write TikTok captions, they argue in Discord threads, they text back and forth all day. That’s writing. That’s practice. Messy, awkward, wrong sometimes, but practice.
I still have Mia’s little print of Frida Kahlo taped to my desk drawer. The sentence that’s going viral still makes me roll my eyes, but it doesn’t make me mad. It just reminds me that we’re so busy looking for proof that kids are getting worse that we miss what they’re actually doing: learning, experimenting, putting their own ideas into words. Some days, it’s still messy. Mia still mixes up adjectives sometimes, still forgets commas in compound sentences. That’s okay. She’s 16. She’s still learning. And that’s not a sign of declining literacy. It’s a sign of literacy happening.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Declining Literacy Panics Over Awkward Student Writing Miss The Mark