Yet Another Study Says Text Messaging Boosts Writing Skills

Studies

from the ah,-this-again? dept

For a while, you couldn’t go a month without seeing yet another story in some newspaper with certain teachers complaining that students were letting “txting” speak appear in their writing — leaving the teachers worried about the English skills of today’s youth. However, as those stories became more popular, people began to notice they were almost all anecdotal. In fact, some people began to point out that all of this writing by kids could actually help them have a better command of the language than in times past, when many kids did almost no writing at all. Finally, in 2003, someone did some research and found that, indeed, kids were actually much more comfortable writing than in the past. While they might experiment with using txting speak or alternative forms of language, they generally learned pretty quickly what was appropriate at what time. Obviously, not everyone gets it right all the time, but the stories of the complete destruction of kids’ language abilities has been overstated. It appears that now there’s even more research to support this. The latest research does show that kids are better writers than in the past (“using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling”) but are still more likely to let the occasional txting shorthand slip into their writing.