<p>I think that these forums encourage debate and help people to learn to support their arguments. They also often help people to develop clear and concise writing. Do you think that for the frequent forum-goer, skills are developed that help out when writing English compositions or term papers?</p>
<p>umm...no. because a lot of people on internet forums are NOT clear, NOT concise, VERY repetitive, and write in internet slang (i.e., lol, u instead of you, etc). i personally dont care what my posts look like on the internet, like starting each sentence with a capital letter. it frankly doesnt matter to me. and i still get an A in English.</p>
<p>charizardpal, when was the last time you saw mla formatted citations in a forum post?</p>
<p>Ah</p>
<p>I think forums are nice for ESL students. Chat rooms are as well. </p>
<p>That is about it.</p>
<p>Depends on what you write on a forum and the associated culture therein, as well as the types of topics that you post in (as well as whether people on the forum generally look up to long thoughtful posts or not, and whether you actually write such posts or not).</p>
<p>Debate threads definitely help. </p>
<p>Describing your personal life may help if you're younger (besides, people on the Internet are willing to point out things that people in real life aren't).</p>
<p>But word association threads? Unlikely (unless it was a SAT word association thread).</p>
<p>"Write" as in write formal papers and whatnot? No, not really. I think it helps you learn to better express yourself through writing, develop your own writing style/voice, and debate threads can help you learn how to present arguments better. But I also think that it encourages you to get stuck in a casual way of writing, which is fine for posting on forums and writing emails and whatnot...but it's not good when you end up writing your 6-page research paper in that same tone because you're so used to using it all the time. </p>
<p>I think that the internet in general encourages bad writing practices...not so much forums specifically because a limited number of people use them, but IMs and emails and networking sites and whatnot. The whole instant messaging thing didn't pick up among the people I know until middle school or so, and we all graduated high school before myspace and whatnot showed up. For me and most people I talk to, at least, this meant that we all had proper spelling and grammar and whatnot drilled into our heads, and it never really occurred to us to not use it, or to type things wrong because it looked neat, or to shorten 3-letter words to one letter. I don't generally capitalize things, but otherwise what I write while IMing looks like what I'd write in a forum post. </p>
<p>I think that when people start the whole internet thing younger, before they've even learned to write correctly in school, it just messes up everything for years to come and they turn into one of those people who's still using the wrong form of "there" when they're 30. I work in my school's admissions office and they keep copies of all email communication with students...there are all these students sending emails to their admissions officers, not bothering to capitalize or punctuate, using words incorrectly and spelling things incorrectly, some of them even referring to the admissions officer as "u". It completely baffles me that anyone would think this is an appropriate method of communication, especially with someone who is essentially in charge of deciding whether or not you're smart enough to go to a particular school.</p>
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But I also think that it encourages you to get stuck in a casual way of writing, which is fine for posting on forums and writing emails and whatnot...but it's not good when you end up writing your 6-page research paper in that same tone because you're so used to using it all the time.</p>
<p>I think that the internet in general encourages bad writing practices...not so much forums specifically because a limited number of people use them, but IMs and emails and networking sites and whatnot. The whole instant messaging thing didn't pick up among the people I know until middle school or so, and we all graduated high school before myspace and whatnot showed up. For me and most people I talk to, at least, this meant that we all had proper spelling and grammar and whatnot drilled into our heads, and it never really occurred to us to not use it, or to type things wrong because it looked neat, or to shorten 3-letter words to one letter. I don't generally capitalize things, but otherwise what I write while IMing looks like what I'd write in a forum post.</p>
<p>I think that when people start the whole internet thing younger, before they've even learned to write correctly in school, it just messes up everything for years to come and they turn into one of those people who's still using the wrong form of "there" when they're 30. I work in my school's admissions office and they keep copies of all email communication with students...there are all these students sending emails to their admissions officers, not bothering to capitalize or punctuate, using words incorrectly and spelling things incorrectly, some of them even referring to the admissions officer as "u". It completely baffles me that anyone would think this is an appropriate method of communication, especially with someone who is essentially in charge of deciding whether or not you're smart enough to go to a particular school.
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<p>If the students aren't intelligent to distinguish between writing that's appropriate for online forums and writing for the academic world, well, then I doubt that they're going to be particularly good writers in the academic world anyways (and they still may introduce informalities from real life conversations into their writing).</p>
<p>Otherwise though, your post was very thoughtful (I should save it somewhere). Certainly, I've been able to discover my own writing style through 6 years of online forums (I don't think I've ever been more than several months away from any online forum).</p>
<p>Actually, to think of it, a forum would be the best way for someone to learn how to write (it would have to be a moderated forum for academic conversations/debates/thoughts on life/the world/etc). Especially for the homeschooled. Essays could be posted online, and people could comment on each other's essays (in fact, this would be the best way to receive constructive feedback). Provided that people had the motivation to give such feedback (and people would have the motivation to discuss such topics online). That being said, there isn't a lot of motivation for people to write long posts.</p>
<p>It's much easier to debate on forums than elsewhere, given the quote tag (and the fact that you can cite things months from when you've said them). Moreover, you can access so much more conversation than you can in real life. Finally, forumers tend to be more intelligent than your average high school students.</p>
<p>I think that they do if you conscientiously use them for that purpose. I started posting at the gamespot.com forums at age 13 to talk about videogames. By age 15 I was arguing politics daily with people a lot older than me, and constantly learning new information, absorbing new vocabulary, and being exposed to new writing techniques.</p>
<p>I ended up making a 5 on the AP English composition test and an 800 on SAT writing.</p>
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I think that they do if you conscientiously use them for that purpose. I started posting at the gamespot.com forums at age 13 to talk about videogames. By age 15 I was arguing politics daily with people a lot older than me, and constantly learning new information, absorbing new vocabulary, and being exposed to new writing techniques.</p>
<p>I ended up making a 5 on the AP English composition test and an 800 on SAT writing.
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<p>Hahaha, it's so awesome when you're among the youngest on an online forum. I hung around an Internet gaming forum since I was 11. I don't think I really improved my reading skills due to it, but I think it contributed to my thoughtfulness/awareness. </p>
<p>That, and most people on online forums talk about topics that certainly are more abstract than the superficial "what's the color of your hair?"/"how tall are you?" questions. They're asked on CC, and those threads have so much popularity, but they're far from the main focus here (as opposed to grade school).</p>
<p>The hilarious thing is that I know people from the forums who later went on to participate in International Olympiads. The forums have a lot of people who are at the 99th percentile/take the SAT in 7th/8th grade, but they generally don't tend to advertise those facts.</p>
<p>Most importantly though, I befriended people who were more thoughtful than most of my classmates. AND, I learned of CTY from them.</p>
<p>It's environment dependent. The people who gain the most from online forums are often those who are unfortunate enough to be raised in remote areas with poor schools (or who just aren't in gifted programs for whatever reason) who then encounter people who can actually recognize the intelligence of those who go to poor schools. On the other hand, if you're in an elite elementary school where the students all take CTY in 7th/8th grade, then the forums are less of a help (though the average CCer is probably smarter than the average CTYer).</p>
<p>On a side note, College Confidential isn't one of the forums where people are encouraged to really self-express themselves. Its main purpose is a question/answer/get information forum. Some of the better threads are the debates, but the debates often tend to be the same ones that tend to repeat. </p>
<p>I've written some long and thoughtful posts here (independently of the debates), and no one really acknowledges the content of them. There isn't a lot of motivation to reply to the long insightful posts of a stranger. </p>
<p>The best forums for self-expression and writing about your personal experiences tend to be the ones with more intimate communities with lower turnover rates. As long as the forums don't become spam-fests. The question is, how are such forums created? </p>
<p>Ideally, the best forums for education are artofproblemsolving.com and physicsforums.com. Any random teenager can step in these forums and learn from them hours on end. But not a lot of them will choose to do such a thing, if there are other things that excite them. I wish that there were some easily google-able social science forums in the way College Confidential is, but there aren't. :(</p>
<p>I started posting on forums when I was...uhh...14, I think? I lived in a small town, not so many intelligent people, especially not intelligent girls who are into things like computers and video games...at first I was really impressed with the fact that there really were more than about 5 intelligent people in the world. An interesting consequence is that this particular forum had a lot of British members, so I ended up picking up a lot of British slang and different ways of wording things just by reading and posting there all the time...that resulted in a couple of other people calling me pretentious or asking me why I was pretending to be foreign. Never realized I was doing it. I really think the people I encountered online at that age were a lot more influential than the people I encountered every day in school. Unfortunately a lot of people (like those I went to school with) seemed to view online-only relationships of any kind as the ultimate in patheticness, no way they can be real friendships, etc. </p>
<p>I actually ran a forum myself for a little while, but it had too few members and too much drama to develop a really strong community unfortunately. There seems to be some sort of delicate balance between having a common subject matter that brings people together without letting that subject overpower every conversation, and having just the right amount of people that the board isn't either the same few posting everything, or a big mass of names you never recognize. People who prefer actual conversations to word games help as well. ;)</p>
<p>Forums did improve my English, along with the internet in general. It stopped being helpful after I turned 10, though.</p>
<p>yes. it helps us to think creatively and also to show people how great and majestic and wonderful and powerful u are</p>
<p>I agree with almost everything InquilineKea has said. Forums are helpful if you use them the right way. I've been posting on forums since I was 8 or 9, and partially because my parents drilled into me a habit of writing properly, but mainly because the forums I posted at mercilessly taunted anyone who used internet slang, I really honed my writing skills. I doubt I would have written much for the past 8 or 9 years if not for forums.</p>
<p>Forums are also good for improving your debating skills and generally opening up your worldview - I might be more intolerant and less flexible and open to other opinions today if not for all the time I spent debating and discussing with other people on forums. All of this, of course, helps when it comes to college admissions. ;)</p>
<p>Having said that, if you need forums to improve your writing skills when you're in college...it does cast doubt on whether your writing is college or even high school standard. :p</p>
<p>i rly dun tink dat pplz who type lyk dis wil lern how 2 rite engrish.</p>
<p>And people don't learn to become a good debater by going to a video game forum talking about which games are hot.</p>
<p>I think it was forums that contributed to the decline in my writing ability ;).</p>
<p>In forums like these, I tend to kinda type on them like I would talk...which isn't exactly good practice for anything.</p>
<p>But when I was younger, I used to go to Hatrack Young Writer's Forum. That place was heaven for me - people posted stories, got critiques (GOOD ones), recommended novels and debated for pages. Unfortunately, Orson Scott Card (he ran it on his site) closed the place down because kids "were being mean to each other". I liked the brutal honesty, personally.</p>
<p>well that's because u have very low self-esteem...as for me...i always post something that is significant so that people will realize how tremendously great and awesome i am.</p>
<p>I think it does help with debating, and with fully articulating our ideas in a concise manner. I am a forums gal and spend my time on gaming forums, I learned some interesting things about boys.. considering I was the only girl.. not fun, but yeah, you get to see other people's views and it helps you in many aspects.</p>
<p>As for gaming forums, it's the outside discussions forums that really matter in the end. How many people actually stick with a game for 3 straight years? Very few.</p>
<p>Do you all like to hang around the Outside Discussions forums of your particular forums?</p>