According to a new Pew Internet and American Life Project report, an alarming number of teenagers are using “informal styles” in school writing assignments.
Half of the teens surveyed say they sometimes fail to use proper capitalization and punctuation in assignments, while 38 percent have carried over the shortcuts typical in instant messaging or e-mail messages, such as “LOL.” A quarter of teens have used 🙂 and other emoticons.
Overall, 64 percent have used at least one of the informal elements in school.
My wife, a middle school social studies teacher, told me that one of her students did not understand why she lost points for not capitalizing the word “Beijing”. The student informed my wife that the word “looked better” when it was not capitalized. Other students complained that my wife unfairly penalized them for improper grammar, failure to capitalize proper nouns, and misspelled words. After all, they pointed out, it was a social studies, not a language arts, assignment.
By the way, I married into a family of excellent teachers. Last week, my sister-in-law won the outstanding first year teacher award for the Darlington County (SC) School District.
