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Teachers are having to decipher the abbreviated and occasionally obscurelanguage of text messages when they mark their students' assignments. Nearly two thirds of teenagers say they are incorporating the more informalstyle of texts when they submit written work at school, and half haveabandoned basic principles such as capitalisation on occasion.
Short-cuts such as LOL - which stands for 'laugh out loud' - have been used by38 per cent of students in their work, and a quarter have used emoticons -the little yellow icons which show a face smiling, or being angry.
An overwhelming majority, however - 73 per cent - say that using informalexpressions such as these make no difference to their normal writing, and 15per cent say that electronic communication has in fact improved their prose.
The study of 700 American teenagers by the Pew Internet and American LifeProject gives an intriguing insight into the writing habits of young people,93 per cent of whom say that writing "for their own pleasure" isimportant.
About seven in ten say that when they are writing 'for themselves', theyprefer to do so by hand. Cecile De Cat, a lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures atthe University of Leeds, said the fact that 'text speak' was permeatingother types of writing would not have a detrimental effect.
"What's at stake here is just the ability to express oneself in more thanone register," she said. "As long as children are taught to usethe standard spelling and to appreciate the difference between registers,this could even be positive."
A spokeswoman for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the educationunion, said that no teachers had complained of an inability to interprettheir students' assignments.
Despite embracing the computers and the internet generally, 49 per cent ofteenagers acknowledge that using word-processing programs to write wouldlikely make them 'take short cuts', and 42 per cent said such programs wouldencourage poor spelling and grammar, the report suggested.
Two in five also said the likes of Microsoft Word would lead them to write tooquickly and too carelessly.
James Billington, the US Librarian of Congress, said recently that the use ofelectronic communications by young people may be damaging "the basicunit of human thought - the sentence."