Great article about how students are using informal Internet-lingo to truncate the English language even in term papers. This is a hard one for me. I’m a stickler for grammar, but also see great potential in all the burgeoning social media and networking platforms.

According to the study, 25% of teens have used and other emoticons in a term paper. That’s making me feel old, or just old-fashioned. Some standards shouldn’t be dropped, and many teachers are using this as an opportunity to teach the difference between proper and not.

“Teens who consider electronic communications with friends as ‘writing’ are more likely to carry the informal elements into school assignments than those who distinguish the two.”

Most surprising is that two-thirds of teens prefer to write papers by hand than to use a computer. Having grown up typing just about everything on a computer and thinking of it as a magical editing tool, I’m not sure what to make of this.

This remind me of the cell phone novels I read about a few weeks ago. A new genre is emerging for novels written and edited entirely and cell phones. One woman even drafts on the computer and then edits on the cell phone.

It seems to me that the most natural subject for this medium would be poetry, yet I don’t see anyone talking about emoticon-laced poetry. That could be considered a stylistic element if done well enough.

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Andy Swindler Categories: General, Social Media, Technology, Web