Culture

"Here's My Essay. :) Sorry It's Late. LOL."

by Jarrett Martineau | April 30, 2008 at 09:53 am

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A good friend of mine is a professor at the University of Toronto and he is absolutely perplexed by the level of informality in the academic writing submitted by his millenial students.

According to him, not only are many students' essays rife with emphatic emoticons, for many students, the extent of their primary and secondary "research" consists of copying and pasting sentences from Wikipedia entries.

In my day, we had to walk for twenty-four hours, in minus 30, through a blizzard, with no shoes or jackets, while being chased by bears, scavenging roadkill for food, and running from the four horsemen of the apocalypse, just to get to the local library to look up one thing in the Encyclopedia Britannica...

Ah, the wonder that is student life in 2008!

A new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that two-thirds of teens admit to using emoticons and other informal styles in academic writing assignments. OMG! Teens who write blogs and frequent sites like Facebook or MySpace have a greater tendency towards using informal writing techniques. The shift in writing styles could mean a “language change,” according to the chairman of the commission’s advisory board. A new language change could emerge over the next generation or two and spell the end of capitalization or proper use of commas. LHTWSF (Learn How to Write Silly Faces.)