Friday, March 07, 2003

New Writing

This article from Reuters about a text-messaging essay for an English class may generate a few emotions in your mind, ranging from skepticism to amusement to concern for the long-term health of language skills among today's youth. Did the author of this "report" intend it as a joke? Or has the abbreviated and heavily symbolic script of the Internet become second nature to a generation that learned text messaging right alongside their alphabet? Does this kind of transformation of communication represent a fundamental change, or does it represent just the latest step along the same evolutionary line that gave us punctuation, third-person dialog and the textual representation of slang?


I don't know.