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Students Use Emoticons In Homework And Teachers Are...>:-O

Teachers beware, the emoticons are coming.

To all you luddites out there, emoticons are those little digital smiley faces you see by tilting your head to the left. :-)

And, apparently, the kids love ‘em so much they’re using them offline too.

According to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a quarter of teens have used emoticons in school assignments.

And that’s not the only trait of casual online & text messaging style that’s making the jump to formal writing: “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, such as LOL for ‘laughing out loud.’”

Teachers are understandably skeptical, but the folks at Pew say not to worry.

“It’s a teachable moment,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew. “If you find that in a child’s or student’s writing, that’s an opportunity to address the differences between formal and informal writing. They learn to make the distinction… just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing.”

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