'Yo, can u plz help me write properly?'

By Steve Freiss
USA Today

Carl Sharp knew there was a problem when he spotted his 15-year-old son's summer job application: "i want 2 b a counselor because i love 2 work with kids."

That night, the Phoenix father removed the AOL Instant Messenger program from the family computer and informed both his children that online chats were over.

"That shorthand comes from talking on the Internet, and it's unacceptable," says Sharp. "I never thought I'd be encouraging my kids to talk on the telephone, but I realized that the constant chatting on the Internet was destroying their ability to write properly."

Parents such as Sharp, and many educators, are becoming increasingly alarmed by the effect of Internet communication on the writing skills of U.S. teens, who spend an average of 12 hours a week online, according to an America Online survey. Much of that time is spent exchanging "instant messages" with software offered by AOL, Yahoo and MSN. This informal communication lends itself to linguistic shortcuts.

Though the shortcuts may have a place in instant messaging, they become troubling when they creep into schoolwork and other formal writing, experts say.

English instructor Cindy Glover, who taught a section of freshman composition at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, says she spent a lot of time unteaching Internet-speak. "My students were trying to communicate fairly academic, scholarly thoughts, but some of them didn't seem to know it's 'y-o-u,' not 'u,' " Glover says.

Writer David Samson of Beverly Hills, Calif., notices the same problem. Teenage fans of his humor books e-mail him and show little regard for formality. He cites one note: "yo mr dave can u plz write me a funny speech about any animal cause i need it for school."

"They seem to avoid every rule I was ever taught about how to get a response from anybody, especially an adult," says Samson, 51.

But many scholars say the problem isn't that kids are developing an alternate form of the language; it's that some don't keep in mind when it's inappropriate.

"It's not that there's never a place for this sort of thing, but it's the difference between how you would dress to go out on Saturday night versus how you dress when you do yard work," says Leila Christenberry, former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. "Quick bursts of very insider phrases and words do fit the electronic format in some ways."