A whole 88 kids. Gosh. I am truly underwhelmed.

This passes for a scientific study?

OMGWTFBBQ PMSL!

Parish because it's the end of the language as we know it... she would be upset!

I cant wait for the future when all these kids have to actually apply for a job 'in writing'. That will be the first point of failure, because most of them cant write, let alone follow instructions. I'm an IT person and I see this problem daily. Spelling has become atrocious. To encourage 'texting' as a learning tool is hilarious! I have always had an issue with teaching kids to spell the words phonetically, just to re-teach them the 'proper' way later. Now with 'text abbreviations' it will just make things worse. l33t speak was/is funny, but could you imagine if THAT was adopted as the standard...

/rant

Yes, well, proper statistical training does not exist for journalists.

Texting is a consequence of ridiculous inertia in the mobile world. You would have thought that mobile email/instant messaging would have caught on and destroyed texting. The pricing of texting is a total rip off, especially for PAYG customers. And that crappy letters imposed on a phone keypad interface? Sheesh. Microwriter anyone?

The prevalence of texting holds back progress.

I H8 TXTN! LOL!

"Surely I must be the only one who abbreviates NOTHING."

No, you're not the only one. Many of us abbreviate "NOTHING" on a regular basis. We abbreviate it as "nil", "nul", or "null", depending on the scenario :)

Who funds these studies? Looks like a great gravy train for people who can ask a few questions, count the ticks to make a spreadsheet and print put pie charts.

I'm looking to find funding for my study that shows that we can reduce crime by 70% by banning tattoos. We see very high percentage of tattoo wearers in the prison population. Therefore tattoos are a significant cause of crime. We should ban tattoos and thereby reduce crime.

Showing correlation does not show causation.

It's already happened - several years ago I was giving a training course at a company and the director mentioned that he'd had a couple of job applications in txt ! Straight in the bin!

(Gv i jb!)

@Lewis - yes agree. 88 out of 20 million or so is hardly statistically significant. Bet they were all at a good school - the non-texters would have been from a "lower" standard school.

Reading and writing correctly is reserved for exams only, mostly if you make a mistake, everyone will read it as you intended.

We've all seen the email with words that have the letters jumbled and can read it ok.

As for you IT people, look at all those programming languages with abbreviations some which make no sense atall !

Yes i went to a grammar school, but (deliberately put after a comma) we hardely use correct grammar.

The world is changing and our language with it, you know we'll all be using txt talk as normal in a hundred years, maybe even programming words chucked in too.

Choose the ones you like and get them mainstream before it's too late

@ least thoz kidz can reed @ all, witch iz mor thn can b xpactd frm mny...

Mine's the one with the Times sticking out of its pocket...

I was not used to typing and so didn't capitalize as I found it a lot quicker and easier. Now though I do most of my emailing on my mobile and this post is also done using my phone. Yeah, it can be a bit laborious but I use predictive text and this works fine for me.

Are you, by chance, referring to "<<" to mean printf()?

I'll get my coat.