textspeak

It’s easy to get old and grouchy. You get a bit past thirty and everything new seems to start sucking pretty hard. It was better back in your day. You get convinced that people are getting stupider, even though studies show that’s not true. And you might get convinced that all the newfangled iPhone thingamabobs and what’samajigs are ruining kids’ minds, and that texting is destroying their grammar. Fortunately, science has never been a friend of narrow-minded old people, and new research shows texting isn’t driving a generation toward writing like illiterates, and in fact may have some beneficial effects. In other words, they know the difference between texting and more formal writing. Nenagh Kemp, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Tasmania and UK’s Coventry University Professor Clare Wood and Ms. Sam Waldron conducted a year-long study of 243 young people in the Conventry area. They obtained all the texts sent during that period, and analyzed them for grammar errors. Kemp writes that most common issues