The most significant global revision was restructuring the essay to eliminate thesis repetition - the original restated the same claim nearly word-for-word three times across the introduction and body, which undermined the essay's chain of thought. I combined three nearly identical body paragraphs on distraction, multitasking, and time management into sharper, more distinct sections, each making a separate point rather than circling the same idea. I also replaced vague source references such as "surveys show" and "research suggests" with properly integrated citations to specific studies, giving the argument more credibility and meeting academic evidence standards. The conclusion was rewritten to go beyond restating the thesis and instead offer a forward-looking reflection on what students and institutions can do with this understanding.
Social media has become one of the defining features of college life. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and X are no longer occasional distractions - they are constant companions woven into the daily routines of most students. A 2023 Pew Research survey found that roughly 95 percent of teenagers and young adults use social media regularly, with many reporting several hours of daily screen time. For college students, whose academic success depends heavily on sustained attention, effective time management, and consistent study habits, this level of digital engagement raises serious concerns. While social media serves genuine communicative and educational purposes, its excessive use damages academic performance by fragmenting attention, reinforcing ineffective multitasking behaviors, and quietly consuming the time and mental energy students need for meaningful academic work.
The academic research on this connection is substantial and consistent. A 2019 meta-analysis by Oberst et al. examining over forty studies found a significant negative correlation between heavy social media use and academic performance across diverse student populations. Critically, this relationship held even when controlling for general internet use, suggesting that social media's design - not screen time alone - is the distinguishing variable. Researchers consistently identify three mechanisms: reduced study time, frequent task interruption, and difficulty maintaining deep focus. Even studies conducted before the rise of TikTok and short-form video found that social media multitasking was associated with lower GPAs (Junco and Cotten). More recent work adds that excessive use also elevates anxiety and fear of missing out (FOMO), which impair cognitive performance independent of screen time (Przybylski et al.).
Despite this evidence, a persistent gap exists between what research shows and how students perceive their own behavior. Many students genuinely believe they can multitask effectively - studying while checking notifications, watching videos between paragraphs, or monitoring group chats without losing focus. This belief is not irrational; task-switching feels seamless in the moment. However, cognitive science research demonstrates that the brain does not truly perform two attention-demanding tasks simultaneously. Instead, it shifts rapidly between them, and each shift carries a cost. Rubinstein et al. found that mental switching between tasks reduces efficiency by as much as forty percent, even when the secondary task feels minimal. For students, this means reading the same paragraph repeatedly, losing the thread of an argument, or arriving at an exam having studied for hours with little retention.
The design of social media platforms makes this problem structurally difficult to avoid. Notifications, autoplay features, algorithmic feeds, and variable reward schedules are not incidental - they are engineered to maximize time on platform. B.J. Fogg's research on persuasive technology demonstrates that these features exploit the same behavioral triggers as slot machines, producing compulsive checking behavior even in users who intend to limit their use. For students, a two-minute break to check Instagram can extend to twenty minutes not because of a failure of willpower, but because the platform is optimized to prevent disengagement. Over a typical study session, these interruptions compound significantly. A student who checks their phone six times per hour loses not just those minutes, but the additional time required to rebuild concentration after each interruption - a recovery period that research estimates at fifteen to twenty-three minutes per distraction (Mark et al.).
Beyond distraction and lost time, social media affects academic performance through a subtler mechanism: mental fatigue. Constant exposure to notifications, social comparison, and emotionally charged content is cognitively taxing. Twenge and Campbell's longitudinal research found that heavy social media users report significantly higher rates of exhaustion, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating compared to moderate users. This fatigue does not clock out when a student sits down to study. Instead, it reduces the cognitive resources available for difficult tasks - reading dense academic texts, solving complex problems, writing analytical arguments - precisely the kinds of work that define college-level learning. Students may interpret this fatigue as a motivation problem or a personal shortcoming rather than recognizing it as a predictable consequence of heavy platform engagement.
It is important to distinguish between types of social media use. Students who use platforms to coordinate group projects, access course materials, or participate in academic communities may experience genuine educational benefits. The harm documented by research is concentrated in entertainment-driven, passive consumption during study time - particularly the habitual, reflexive checking that interrupts deep work. This distinction matters for how the issue is framed: the goal is not abstinence from social media but intentionality about when and how it is used in relation to academic work.
The long-term implications deserve consideration as well. Students who spend four years developing habits of fragmented attention and reactive task-switching are not simply earning lower grades - they are building cognitive patterns that will persist beyond college. Deep reading, sustained analysis, and focused problem-solving are skills that require practice. If social media consistently interrupts that practice, students may graduate with weaker capacities for the kind of thinking their degrees are supposed to develop.
The evidence is clear enough to warrant more than individual awareness. Students benefit from understanding the specific mechanisms by which social media disrupts learning - not so they can feel guilty about screen time, but so they can make genuinely informed choices. Institutions, too, have a role: designing study environments that reduce digital interruption, offering media literacy education that addresses platform design rather than just content, and building policies that treat this as a structural challenge rather than a personal failing. Social media is not going away, and it should not have to. But understanding how it shapes attention, time, and mental energy is the first step toward using it in ways that support rather than compete with academic life.
Junco, Reynol, and Shelia R. Cotten. "No A 4 U: The Relationship Between Multitasking and Academic Performance." Computers & Education, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012, pp. 505–514.
Mark, Gloria, et al. "The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2008, pp. 107–110.
Oberst, Ursula, et al. "Negative Consequences from Heavy Social Networking in Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Fear of Missing Out." Journal of Adolescence, vol. 55, 2017, pp. 51–60.
Przybylski, Andrew K., et al. "Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of Fear of Missing Out." Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 29, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1841–1848.
Rubinstein, Joshua S., et al. "Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 27, no. 4, 2001, pp. 763–797.
Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. "Associations Between Screen Time and Lower Psychological Well-Being Among Children and Adolescents." Preventive Medicine Reports, vol. 12, 2018, pp. 271–283.
Dear Professor Bent,
When I enrolled in ENC 2135, I thought writing was something I either did well or did not, depending on the assignment. I had a general sense that good writing meant clear sentences and a thesis, and I believed I could produce that reliably enough. What this course changed was not my ability to produce sentences but my understanding of what writing actually does - how it functions differently depending on who is reading it, why, and in what context. That shift in understanding is the most significant thing I am taking out of this semester, and I want to use this letter to trace how it developed across the three major projects.
The first project, the Investigative Field Essay, introduced me to the idea that academic writing is not just about having an argument but about earning it. My essay examined how excessive social media use damages college students' academic performance. I came into it believing the claim was obvious enough that I could state it and move on. What I discovered through the drafting process was that obvious claims are the ones most in need of rigorous support, because readers are more likely to question what they think they already know than what genuinely surprises them. My early drafts restated the thesis repeatedly rather than building toward it, which I now recognize as a symptom of not trusting the evidence enough to let it do the work. The revision process - particularly the global revision I completed for this portfolio - forced me to stop restating and start analyzing. I had to ask not just what the research says but how each piece of evidence connects to the next, and what the accumulation of that evidence actually proves. That is a different kind of thinking than I had practiced before, and it made the final essay substantially stronger.
The first project also made me reckon with sourcing in a way I had avoided before. My original draft relied on vague attribution - phrases like "research shows" or "studies suggest" - without naming the studies themselves. Part of this was laziness, but part of it was a genuine misunderstanding of what citations are for. I thought citations were a formality, a way of signaling that I had done research. Through revision, I came to understand that specific citations are a rhetorical tool. Naming a researcher, a journal, a year - these details allow a reader to evaluate the claim independently. They are not decoration; they are evidence of intellectual honesty. That realization changed how I approach sourcing in every piece of writing I do now.
The second project, the Multigenre Campaign on creatine supplement misinformation, introduced a completely different set of challenges. Instead of producing one genre for one audience, I had to produce multiple compositions - an infographic, an open letter, and a Facebook post - each targeting a different audience and requiring a different rhetorical approach. This was the point in the semester where I most clearly understood what genre actually means. Before this project, I thought genre was mostly a matter of format: a letter looks like a letter, an essay looks like an essay. What the multigenre project revealed is that genre is a set of expectations, affordances, and constraints that shapes not just how a piece looks but what it can do.
The infographic, for example, could not make a sustained argument. Its affordance was skimmability - the ability to communicate key facts in seconds to a reader who was not going to stop and read carefully. This meant that every design and content choice had to serve that constraint. I could not include nuance the way I could in a longer piece. When addressing the hair loss myth around creatine, I could not simply say it was false, because that would have been inaccurate - a single small study did suggest a possible hormonal link. I had to find a way to be honest about the complexity of that claim in a format that had almost no room for complexity. That tension between accuracy and brevity was the central creative and rhetorical challenge of that composition, and working through it taught me more about genre constraints than any single definition could have.
The open letter operated under different constraints entirely. Where the infographic relied on logos - presenting clean, credible, organized information - the open letter's primary rhetorical tool was pathos. I addressed the reader directly as "Dear Fellow College Student," which immediately positioned me as a peer rather than an authority. That was a deliberate choice, and it required me to think carefully about voice in a way that the field essay had not. Academic writing largely obscures the writer's personality in favor of objectivity. The open letter demanded the opposite: the more personal and direct the voice, the more persuasive the piece. Writing a sentence like "let's be honest" or "let's face it, that describes most of us during midterms" would have been completely out of place in the field essay. In the open letter, those phrases were doing essential rhetorical work - they were building the sense of shared experience that makes a reader trust the writer enough to follow the argument.
The Facebook post, which targeted parents of college students rather than the students themselves, required yet another shift. The audience was different, the platform was different, and the relationship between writer and reader was different. Parents engage with health information about their children through a lens of concern and protectiveness, not peer solidarity. The rhetorical strategies that worked for the open letter - casual tone, peer identification, light humor - would have felt dismissive or unprofessional to a parent audience. I had to recalibrate toward ethos and pathos calibrated for parental concern: credible, caring, and clear, without being alarmist. Moving between these three audiences within the same campaign made me aware of how much of writing is audience analysis, and how a strong argument in one context can fall completely flat in another.
The SPACECAT framework was useful throughout this project in ways I did not anticipate. I initially treated it as a checklist - something to fill in before writing rather than something to return to during writing. But as I drafted and revised the compositions, I found myself coming back to the framework's questions, particularly around context and constraints. Who is reading this, when, and in what environment? What does this platform allow and what does it limit? What does the audience already believe, and how does that shape what I need to do rhetorically? These are not questions you answer once at the beginning of a project. They are questions you keep asking as the writing evolves, because the answers change what you need to do at the sentence level, the paragraph level, and the structural level.
One of the most productive moments of difficulty in the semester came from the feedback I received after the first draft of the multigenre campaign. The original audience pairing targeted college students and general gym-goers - two groups that are similar enough that the rhetorical strategies for each overlapped significantly. The feedback pointed out that a stronger campaign would create more contrast between audiences, requiring genuinely different rhetorical approaches. Shifting the second audience to parents of college students was the direct result of that feedback, and it made the entire project more analytically rigorous. I had to rethink not just the Facebook post but the overall campaign logic - how the three compositions worked together and what each one contributed that the others could not. That experience taught me something about revision that goes beyond fixing sentences: sometimes revision means reconceiving the project from the ground up, and that is not a failure of the first draft but a necessary part of the process.
Looking across the three projects together, I can identify a pattern in my own development. Early in the semester, I wrote primarily for completion - to produce something that met the requirements and made a defensible argument. By the end of the semester, I was writing with a much stronger awareness of audience, purpose, and effect. The question I now ask first is not "what do I want to say?" but "what does this reader need to hear, in what form, and through what kind of appeal?" That shift does not make writing easier - in some ways it makes it harder, because it multiplies the decisions involved in every sentence. But it makes the writing better, and it makes the process more intentional.
The composing practices I developed this semester - drafting with a clear rhetorical purpose, revising globally rather than just locally, integrating specific evidence rather than gesturing toward it, and calibrating voice and tone to audience - are practices I expect to carry into every piece of writing I do after this course. As a mechanical engineering student, I will write lab reports, technical documents, project proposals, and eventually professional communications. Those genres look nothing like an open letter or an infographic, but the underlying questions are the same: who is reading this, what do they need to understand, and what is the most effective way to communicate it? ENC 2135 gave me a vocabulary and a set of habits for answering those questions, and that is what I will take with me.
Respectfully,
Maynor Lopez