OMG, Students’ Internet Lexicon Creeps into School Writing

By Anastacia Mott Austin

OMG, it’s not even LOL funny. Researchers have found that middle- and high-school students’ academic writing often contains snippets of the abbreviated acronyms or "emoticons" they use online with their friends.

Data was collected in 2007 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in collaboration with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing.

The two organizations conducted interviews with kids from ages 12-17, along with their parents. The results were compiled into a study titled, "Writing, Technology and Teens," which aimed to discover the connection, if there is one, between the writing teens do for school and what they use online to connect with their friends.

Sixty-four percent of students surveyed admitted that they have at times allowed the informal style from their online lives to seep into their schoolwork. This tendency increased the more the students used social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.

A smaller percentage, 38 percent, said they have actually used abbreviated acronyms (such as "LOL" for laughing out loud) in academic essays at school, and a quarter of those surveyed had used the smiley-face  or other emoticons in schoolwork.

But what does it all mean? Is student writing degenerating due to the influence of Internet social slang, or is the fact that students are writing more in general because of their social networking sites a good thing?

It depends on who you ask. Cecile De Cat, from the University of Leeds’ School of Modern Languages and Cultures, compares the practice to using two different languages. "What's at stake here is just the ability to express oneself in more than one register," said De Cat to reporters. "As long as children are taught to use the standard spelling and to appreciate the difference between registers, this could even be positive."

Richard Sterling, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the director of the National Writing Project, agrees to a point. "We always want more from students. I think that this explosion of writing is actually a very good thing," said Sterling to reporters. Yet Sterling also pointed out one of the disadvantages that students may pick up when modeling their writing styles around what they see online. "Society at large is fast, quick-paced; a lot of the media is in small bites, and that does get reflected in their writing. There tends to be a kind of breathless pace to a lot of the work that they produce," said Sterling.

But even those who feel that the influence of the Internet on students’ writing is not a positive one agree that instances of "e-speak" can be used as an opportunity to teach proper writing skills.

"It's a teachable moment," said Amanda Lenhart, a researcher from 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."