Interesting! Lunsford says that oral performance is a major part of writing. She did a study of 190 Stanford students for several years that followed all their academic writing in addition to any extra submissions they provided (over 15,000 samples). The sample set ranged in genre, including literature, essays, poetry, text messages, emails, etc. The minority of the material was not written by hand. However, Lunsford says that writing ability improves in general as students progress through university, contrary to popular belief that the writing of casual student-age material (emails/text messages/etc.) is indicative of their writing capabilities in general.
