from U.S. teens earn a : ( in writing [iht.com] :It is nothing to LOL about: Despite best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of U.S. teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.
[...]
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, like "LOL" for "laughing out loud." A quarter of teens have used :) and other emoticons.
Over all, 64 percent said they had used at least one of the informal elements in school.
[...]
Teens who consider electronic communications with friends as "writing" are more likely to carry the informal elements into school assignments than those who distinguish between the two.
The chairman of the [National Commission on Writing] advisory board, Richard Sterling, said the rules could possibly change completely within a generation or two: Perhaps the start of sentences would no longer need capitalization, the way the use of commas has decreased over the past few decades. "Language changes," Sterling said. [...]
*quotes jack kerouac :
<< remove literary grammatical syntactic inhibition >>
*also quotes bob dylan
<< come mothers and fathers throughout the land
don't criticize what you can't understand --
yr sons and yr daughters are beyond yr command
and yr old road is rapidly aging --
so get out of the new one if you can't lend a hand,
for the times, they are a-changing. >>
*knows which way the wind blows
