Fragmented Essays, Fragmented Minds: Writing in the Digital Age

by Laura Del Viscio 

Photo by Ire Photocreative on Unsplash

As someone who writes in fragments, I can assure you that the mind is a funny thing. It jumps from one moment to the next, with little attention to long and winding detail. I got to thinking, I wonder why that is? I ran through my list of hypotheses as to why my mind can only function in small increments. Was it that every time I sat down to write an essay, the memories became too vivid to bear, so my mind fought back and decided enough was enough, on to the next thing ?

​That was my first thought. But then something else occurred to me: my mind has been bouncing back and forth from untethered thought to unfinished thought for quite some time now. So I ask myself again, why is this? 

​I’ll tell you why: short-form media.  ​

I look around at my students, my children, adults my age and older, and I see people reading on their smart phones. Maybe it’s texts, maybe it's TikTok, X, or Instagram, but whatever it is, I can guarantee you that they are reading something in fragments. 

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

Let’s be honest, in today’s day and age, slowing down is tough. Our minds have adapted to processing information quickly and moving on.  I can’t even count how many times I’ve abandoned one thought for the next and moved on before finishing the first. So why would the way we write be any different? 

If we’re reading in fragments, we’re probably writing in them too. 

Kawsar Ahamed, an independent researcher on literature, conducted a study on how fragmented reading fueled by technology shapes narrative structure. Fragmented essays don’t really have a linear narrative, right? But when pieced together, they can create a whole cohesive story. The same holds true for writing in the digital space. We use short bursts of writing because platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and even texts shape our habits. Although the study focuses on partly fiction, the findings spill over into other genres. Ahamed points to an example of contemporary fiction with Jennifer Egan’s novel Welcome to the Goon Squad where an entire chapter is written as a power point presentation. Now that definitely influences the shape of storytelling to adapt to modern-world fragmentation in technology. While PowerPoint may feel dated now, it was groundbreaking for narrative structure when the novel debuted in 2010. 

Photo by Fili Santillán on Unsplash

This raises the bigger question: does writing in fragments cause disconnection and make it more difficult for the reader to engage? 

I don’t think so. After all, Jennifer Egan’s novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, so clearly our minds can adapt to this modern way of reading and writing.  ​

We all talk about adapting and being open to change. How many times have we heard the saying, “If you don’t change, you don’t grow?” Well, the same holds true for writing. Adapting to the digital world through fragmented structures can be beneficial for not only our own minds as writers, but for the reader as well. So why did I assume that writing in fragments was a flaw? Why did I think my mind was broken if my essays didn’t come out in long, uninterrupted lines? It wasn’t. I was simply adapting to my environment in this digital age. 

And Egan’s novel is just one example of how fragmentation can serve us. Ahamed offers multiple, global examples of how this type of writing outperforms traditional structure, especially when multimodal components come into play. 

We can interpret research in a negative way, like the Pew study from The Standard that claims we now have shorter attention spans than a goldfish. But instead of dwelling on that, we could also use this information to adapt and shift the way we write. Why not make our writing more easily digestible for our readers? Instead of blaming the audience for not paying attention, we can shape our writing to make it more palatable for an ever changing literary landscape.

Maybe writing in fragments isn’t the downfall of literature; maybe it’s the evolution of it. After all, we live in a world where switching tabs counts as cardio and where a “long read” counts as anything over 500 words. If we’ve trained ourselves to think in highlights, why not write in them?

Social media has trained an entire generation to think in fragments, we can use these fragments to write purposefully. We’re not losing the art of storytelling, we’re rearranging it, one bold, bright fragment at a time. If readers can binge watch a whole season in one night, they can absolutely keep up.