Do you think your kid spends too much time on Facebook or blogging?  It turns out that social interaction on the web is making younger people better storytellers.  

The National Assessment of Educational Progress finds that by posting status updates, keeping a blog, even sending texts to friends, students are exercising their writing skills.  Although the style is informal, it's a confidence builder.

"These students are a lot more comfortable with writing because they're always participating with writing in some way," said University of Louisiana English professor Mary Adams.

Adams says writing assignments aren't nearly as feared as they once were, and students are getting better at crafting a narrative.

"We're not asking them to do something that's terribly different from what they've been doing in the informal setting.  We're asking them to use those same writing skills," she said.

And thanks to all the time today's kids seem to spend using writing as a form of communicating -- even in a form as abbreviated as text messages or Twitter -- their storytelling skills, if not their spelling and grammar, are improving.