Instant grammar

Knight Ridder/Tribune

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Tina Deamicis is teetering on a language high wire.

When she's online with friends or family, the English teacher at St. Cloud High School is an avid user of the language of instant messaging, with its clipped, slangy style of "u" for "you" and "lol" for "laughing out loud." But when she sees that kind of informality turning up in her students' assignments -- along with sentence fragments and missing punctuation -- it's no laughing matter.

"Students are prone to use bizarre abbreviations and spellings," says Deamicis, who blames instant messaging for the shift to sloppy writing. "They don't seem to make the distinction between casual and academic language."

Though there's no evidence that anything as radical as "4skor & 7 yrs ago" is about to enter the lexicon, teachers are still distressed to see students slipping into the IM language when writing what is supposed to be formal composition.

Students acknowledge that it's not easy to break out of the IM routine. When they spend an hour or two a day with online companions, something just seems to happen -- fingers and brain kick into the IM style without conscious effort.

"I find myself writing 'cuz' and 'u' and '2,'" says Lake Brantley High senior Matthew Sokoloff. "I really have to stop and think about it" when typing a class assignment.

A lot of students really do know the difference.

Take Ocoee Middle School seventh-grader Chelsea Price, who's nicknamed the "IM Queen" because she often chats with a half-dozen members of her buddies list at once. She has been typing since second grade.

"I like to create excitement in my writing," Chelsea says. "I put in a lot of exclamation points, and I use u and r and the @ sign for 'at.'" She may fall into IM style when composing the first draft of an English composition but says she knows the difference between IM and formal writing -- and her papers are turned in devoid of the digital shorthand.

Ditto with Nia Phillips, 12. To illustrate how she might write about her summer vacation in the Bahamas, the Ocoee Middle School student composed a paragraph in IM style: "Lots of tourists wr hagglin 4 good prices. I wuz n awe of all da beautiful things. I bot n anklet dat jingles win I wlk." The essay she handed in to her teacher, however, was in carefully composed standard English.

Tina Stewart, a teacher at Greenwood Lakes Middle School in Seminole County, Fla., says her first encounter with IM in a written assignment left her "totally shocked."

"I responded by writing a terse note on the graded paper that I was the teacher and not an IM buddy," she says.

"I then talked to the class about writing for a specific audience. This use of slang might be OK for notes to their friends and Internet buddies, but not for school compositions."

Another view

Yet many prominent linguists aren't alarmed.

"We should be encouraged to see a generation of youngsters tapping away at the keyboard instead of fingering a TV remote," says Leila Christenbury, president of the National Council of Teachers of English and an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. "My gosh, this is an English teacher's dream."

"It's something to celebrate and exploit," she says. "Enforcing correct usage is a constant battle, but an ampersand and the numeral 4 in students' writing are surmountable."

But the problem, critics of IM say, is that students get into bad habits and forget to clean up their errors.

When an honors English teacher recently assigned an essay on Beowulf, she found papers laden with u, r, 2, b/c and other IM shortcuts, prompting a one-point penalty for each miscue. Students who omitted a period at the end of a sentence were penalized five points.

South Lake High School's Melissa Merritt also subtracts points from students' grades. At the beginning of the year, she just gave warnings. But, when they weren't heeded, she began deducting points.

"If the problem is too out of control, I return the paper and demand a rewrite," she says.

Some students just don't seem to believe grammar and punctuation rules apply to them.

"Punctuation? What's that? It seems to have gone right out the window," Merritt says. And when she points out students' mistakes, their reply is, "It's OK in IM, so why not in school?"

Second chances

Nicole Barnes, a teacher at Olympia High School in Orange County, Fla., has given clear guidelines for what she expects in written work. She also offers students a chance to rewrite papers, both for a better grade and also for growth in writing, she says.

Colonial High School's Lynne Edinger believes students can differentiate between IM and narrative writing. However, she still sees sentence fragments and poorly punctuated sentences.

Edinger says students' use of shortcuts, such as "b4" for "before," diminishes if they are pointed out and corrected regularly.

There's another downside as students have gravitated to computer keyboards: Penmanship is suffering. Vicki Poole, an English teacher at Lake Brantley High in Altamonte Springs, Fla., says that about a third of the handwritten papers that cross her desk are a struggle to read.

Her colleague Marty Gartell, who teaches ninth-graders, sees a bigger problem. He thinks instant messaging has weakened students' writing voices.

"They don't put ideas together well," he says. "E-mail style is short, terse statements without development."

Instant messaging really isn't so different from other forms of shorthand used by stenographers, reporters, or even the telegraph operators of yesteryear.

It also certainly isn't the first case of technology putting custodians of English in a dither. It happened more than a century ago when the telegraph outpaced the Pony Express for quick communication.

Because messages were billed by the word, writers omitted prepositions and articles.

Yet people didn't forget how to write full, punctuated sentences and the English language didn't experience a meltdown, says Steven Pinker, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Going back even further, language watchdogs have fretted needlessly, says Jesse Sheidlower, North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

For instance, Shakespeare used abbreviations and a different style of capitalization than we do.

"People talk about the instant messaging style with its abbreviations and lower case letters, yet people are writing more than ever," he says.

"If they're writing more informally, well, so what? The use of shortened forms and abbreviations was enormously common in Latin in the Middle Ages. The issues are similar today."

Or as one student responded when asked about IM: "It's just a convo about life.

"It's kewl."