I opened up the newspaper this morning and saw that there was an interesting article about teenage students, chat-speak and their homework assignments. The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study on Thursday that show that teenagers are letting slang like "lol" and emoticons slip into their schoolwork. Teens who keep things like a MySpace, FaceBook or a blog have greater tendencies to mix their formal and informal writing together. Half of the teenagers surveyed admit to sometimes omitting even capitalization and punctuation, while thirty-eight percent use lol, rofl, plz and the such and a quarter use emoticons.

It has nearly been a year since I graduated high school and this article is one of the most interesting education-related pieces I have read in a while. See, when I write anything, I at least try to spell, use grammar, punctuation and try to write out everything I can. Even when sending instant messages I write full, thought-out sentences. The thing is, I can't understand why the carrying over of text-lingo into other pieces is so wide-spread. I understand that many phone companies charge by the character for text messages, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to understand what everyone else is saying if while on things like blogs and chat rooms we use proper English? It took me the longest time to figure out what many of the chat-speak abbreviations meant and I still don't know them all.

Why do people do this? Seriously, it's much harder to understand someone when all rules of our language seem to disappear once fingertips touch a keyboard. To me, this is the absence of understanding a language rather than the evolution of one. Is there anyone else frustrated/annoyed by this or am I just blowing this out of proportion?

You can find the article here on the internet, but I read it in this morning's edition of The Macomb Daily. Check your local newsprints, since the aticle is an Associated Press article and therefore can run anywhere.