Messaging shorthand seeps into formal usage

Mon, 05/05/2008 - 16:48 — birdie

OMG! WTH r kidz riting 2day?

Are you finding students utilizing text-message shorthand to express themselves in classwork and other communications? It's a trend so it seems.

While students are more likely to forgo text-messaging slang and acronyms in school assignments, they often will forget to maintain a level of academic formality when communicating with their teachers via e-mail, dropping punctuation and using acronyms.

“You’d think they would think ‘Oh, I’m writing my English teacher,’ but they use acronyms and forget punctuation and capitalization,” but that's not the case. Many teachers will forgive the informality in e-mails, because it’s a practice they themselves have grown accustomed to.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington recently expressed concern about what he called the “slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence.” Mr. Billington said he fears the disjointed prose of text messaging and chat-room discourse has damaged young Americans’ ability to write clearly. Chattanooga Free Times has the scoop.