September 19, 2002

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

EACH September Jacqueline Harding prepares a classroom

presentation on the common writing mistakes she sees in her

students' work.

Ms. Harding, an eighth-grade English teacher at Viking

Middle School in Guernee, Ill., scribbles the words that

have plagued generations of schoolchildren across her

whiteboard:

There. Their. They're.

Your. You're.

To. Too. Two.

Its. It's.

This September, she has added

a new list: u, r, ur, b4, wuz, cuz, 2.

When she asked her students how many of them used shortcuts

like these in their writing, Ms. Harding said, she was not

surprised when most of them raised their hands. This, after

all, is their online lingua franca: English adapted for the

spitfire conversational style of Internet instant

messaging.

Ms. Harding, who has seen such shortcuts creep into student

papers over the last two years, said she gave her students

a warning: "If I see this in your assignments, I will take

points off."

"Kids should know the difference," said Ms. Harding, who

decided to address this issue head-on this year. "They

should know where to draw the line between formal writing

and conversational writing."

As more and more teenagers socialize online, middle school

and high school teachers like Ms. Harding are increasingly

seeing a breezy form of Internet English jump from e-mail

into schoolwork. To their dismay, teachers say that papers

are being written with shortened words, improper

capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $

and @.

Teachers have deducted points, drawn red circles and

tsk-tsked at their classes. Yet the errant forms continue.

"It stops being funny after you repeat yourself a couple of

times," Ms. Harding said.

But teenagers, whose social life can rely as much these

days on text communication as the spoken word, say that

they use instant-messaging shorthand without thinking about

it. They write to one another as much as they write in

school, or more.

"You are so used to abbreviating things, you just start

doing it unconsciously on schoolwork and reports and other

things," said Eve Brecker, 15, a student at Montclair High

School in New Jersey.

Ms. Brecker once handed in a midterm exam riddled with

instant-messaging shorthand. "I had an hour to write an

essay on Romeo and Juliet," she said. "I just wanted to

finish before my time was up. I was writing fast and

carelessly. I spelled `you' `u.' " She got a C.

Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making

their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some

of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she

recently taught as part of an internship. "They would be

trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley

face in the end," said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia

College in Reading, Pa. "If they were presenting an

argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they

would put a frown."

As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton

Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today's

students are "Generation Text."

Almost 60 percent of the online population under age 17

uses instant messaging, according to Nielsen / NetRatings.

In addition to cellphone text messaging, Weblogs and

e-mail, it has become a popular means of flirting, setting

up dates, asking for help with homework and keeping in

contact with distant friends. The abbreviations are a

natural outgrowth of this rapid-fire style of

communication.

"They have a social life that centers around typed

communication," said Judith S. Donath, a professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab who has

studied electronic communication. "They have a writing

style that has been nurtured in a teenage social milieu."

Some teachers see the creeping abbreviations as part of a

continuing assault of technology on formal written English.

Others take it more lightly, saying that it is just part of

the larger arc of language evolution.

"To them it's not wrong," said Ms. Harding, who is 28.

"It's acceptable because it's in their culture. It's hard

enough to teach them the art of formal writing. Now we've

got to overcome this new instant-messaging language."

Ms. Harding noted that in some cases the shorthand isn't

even shorter. "I understand `cuz,' but what's with the

`wuz'? It's the same amount of letters as `was,' so what's

the point?" she said.

Deborah Bova, who teaches eighth-grade English at Raymond

Park Middle School in Indianapolis, thought her eyesight

was failing several years ago when she saw the sentence "B4

we perform, ppl have 2 practice" on a student assignment.

"I thought, `My God, what is this?' " Ms. Bova said. "Have

they lost their minds?"

The student was summoned to the board to translate the

sentence into standard English: "Before we perform, people

have to practice." She realized that the students thought

she was out of touch. "It was like `Get with it, Bova,' "

she said.

Ms. Bova had a student type up a reference list of

translations for common instant-messaging expressions. She

posted a copy on the bulletin board by her desk and took

another one home to use while grading.

Students are sometimes unrepentant.

"They were astonished

when I began to point these things out to them," said Henry

Assetto, a social studies teacher at Twin Valley High

School in Elverson, Pa. "Because I am a history teacher,

they did not think a history teacher would be checking up

on their grammar or their spelling," said Mr. Assetto, who

has been teaching for 34 years.

But Montana Hodgen, 16, another Montclair student, said she

was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that

she often read right past them. She proofread a paper last

year only to get it returned with the messaging

abbreviations circled in red.

"I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on

Instant Messenger that I didn't even realize that there was

something wrong," she said. She said her ability to

separate formal and informal English declined the more she

used instant messages. "Three years ago, if I had seen

that, I would have been `What is that?' "

The spelling checker doesn't always help either, students

say. For one, Microsoft Word's squiggly red spell-check

lines don't appear beneath single letters and numbers such

as u, r, c, 2 and 4. Nor do they catch words which have

numbers in them such as "l8r" and "b4" by default.

Teenagers have essentially developed an unconscious

"accent" in their typing, Professor Donath said. "They have

gotten facile at typing and they are not paying attention."

Teenagers have long pushed the boundaries of spoken

language, introducing words that then become passé with

adult adoption. Now teenagers are taking charge and pushing

the boundaries of written language. For them, expressions

like "oic" (oh I see), "nm" (not much), "jk" (just kidding)

and "lol" (laughing out loud), "brb" (be right back),

"ttyl" (talk to you later) are as standard as conventional

English.

"There is no official English language," said Jesse

Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English

Dictionary. "Language is spread not because not anyone

dictates any one thing to happen. The decisions are made by

the language and the people who use the language."

Some teachers find the new writing style alarming. "First

of all, it's very rude, and it's very careless," said Lois

Moran, a middle school English teacher at St. Nicholas

School in Jersey City.

"They should be careful to write properly and not to put

these little codes in that they are in such a habit of

writing to each other," said Ms. Moran, who has lectured

her eighth-grade class on such mistakes.

Others say that the instant-messaging style might simply be

a fad, something that students will grow out of. Or they

see it as an opportunity to teach students about the

evolution of language.

"I turn it into a very positive teachable moment for kids

in the class," said Erika V. Karres, an assistant professor

at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who

trains student teachers. She shows students how English has

evolved since Shakespeare's time. "Imagine Langston

Hughes's writing in quick texting instead of `Langston

writing,' " she said. "It makes teaching and learning so

exciting."

Other teachers encourage students to use messaging

shorthand to spark their thinking processes. "When my

children are writing first drafts, I don't care how they

spell anything, as long as they are writing," said Ms.

Fogarty, the sixth-grade teacher from Houlton, Maine. "If

this lingo gets their thoughts and ideas onto paper

quicker, the more power to them." But during editing and

revising, she expects her students to switch to standard

English.

Ms. Bova shares the view that instant-messaging language

can help free up their creativity. With the help of

students, she does not even need the cheat sheet to read

the shorthand anymore.

"I think it's a plus," she said. "And I would say that with

a + sign."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/technology/circuits/19MESS.html?ex=1033530978&ei=1&en=751dee201917221e