Teachers :( to find emoticons in schoolwork
NEW YORK (AP) - April 24, 2008 The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released
Thursday, also found that teens who keep blogs or use
social-networking sites like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace have
a greater tendency to slip nonstandard elements into assignments.
The results may give parents, teachers and others a big :( - a
frown to the rest of us - though the study's authors see hope.
"It's a teachable moment," said Amanda Lenhart, senior
research specialist at Pew. "If you find that in a child's or
student's writing, that's an opportunity to address the differences
between formal and informal writing. They learn to make the
distinction ... just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal
writing."
Half of the teens surveyed say they sometimes fail to use proper
capitalization and punctuation in assignments, while 38 percent
have carried over the shortcuts typical in instant messaging or
e-mail messages, such as "LOL" for "laughing out loud." A
quarter of teens have used :) and other emoticons.
Overall, 64 percent have used at least one of the informal
elements in school.
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.
The study was co-sponsored by the National Commission on Writing
at the College Board, the nonprofit group that administers the SAT
and other placement tests.
The chairman of the commission's advisory board, Richard
Sterling, said the rules could possibly change completely within a
generation or two: Perhaps the start of sentences would no longer
need capitalization, the way the use of commas has decreased over
the past few decades. "Language changes," Sterling said.
Defying conventional wisdom, the study also found that the
generation born digital is shunning computer use for most
assignments. About two-thirds of teens say they typically do their
school writing by hand. And for personal writing outside school,
longhand is even more popular - the preferred form for nearly
three-quarters of teens.
That could be because the majority of writing is short - school
assignments are on average a paragraph to a page in length, Lenhart
said.
Among other findings:
- Teens who keep blogs are more likely to engage in personal
writing. They also tend to believe that writing will prove crucial
to their eventual success in life.
- Parents are more likely than teens to believe that
Internet-based writing such as e-mail and instant messaging affects
writing overall, though both groups are split on whether the
electronic communications help or hurt. Nonetheless, 73 percent of
teens and 40 percent of parents believe Internet writing makes no
difference either way.
The telephone-based survey of 700 U.S. residents ages 12 to 17
and their parents was conducted Sept. 19 to Nov. 16 and has a
margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.