There’s a commonly held view that kids using SMS abbreviation is going to be the ruin of the English language. But what if all that typing is actually just great practice?
Randall Munroe muses on the fact that some of the most celebrated writers didn’t write in a way that their elders may have approved of (check out the full cartoon below or on XKCD). And, hey, maybe all that writing will make the younger generations absolute pros. He even details an experiment that could kinda prove it:
“I’d like to find a corpus of writing writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher’s 7th grade class every year) — and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I’ve heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I’d bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.”
Sounds like a challenge, right? [XKCD]