Professional Writing Devolution

I just started a late start English class. The class is completely online and the teacher has decided to put us into groups. Don't get me wrong, I love group work, but attempting it in an online class is not fun. One of our first tasks was to answer the question, "How will professional writing evolve in the 21st century?" To answer it we have been provided three chapters of reading and several handouts. Couple that with our own individual work and area-of-study experiences and you'd think we could get somewhere right? Wrong. I kicked off the discussion with this post just to get the ball rolling:

"The evolution of professional writing frightens me. I work as a mechanical designer at an engineering company. Mechanical designers and drafters most often have two-year technical degrees whereas engineers typically have four-year degrees. The difference in email structure between a new graduate and an experienced employee is like night and day, especially when talking about a new, two-year graduate. This is because a two-year, technical degree often times does not include writing courses. We usually will not allow new grads to email clients directly until we have seen a handful of interoffice emails from them. They might not know that we are monitoring their writing, but we do. Grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors are definitely more common with new hires right out of school.

I believe this problem stems from the emergence of texting and social networking platforms in this world today. Young adults have become accustomed to speedy communication while simply ignoring the quality of their words. When sending a text message for example, it is a lot quicker to send a message without capital letters or punctuation. Doing this enough times may cause an individual to carry these poor practices over to professional or educational communications without even realizing it. Texting and social networking sites are a great thing, but individuals must be able to differentiate when it is appropriate to take shortcuts in writing. When you write at the professional level, you and your company are being judged based on what and how you write."

I made this post hoping for some feedback, especially from teenage students in my group. Instead, four days later only one other person has participated in the discussion. After making a post to try to encourage my teammates to participate before the week is over (keep in mind we are graded based on group participation), this was one of the missing students' first post:

"Evolution of professional writing? ok... I think what the teacher was saying is now days you have to have a general understanding of how to navigate online and need to know how to use professional resources online? well if this is the case I think in the near future, all students and employees will have to know how to navigate themselves in the world of cyber space and utilize the resources online provided to them"

Thank you teammate for providing justification for my first post.

AE