She had a week to write this paper. She should not have procrastinated this long. There was only half an hour left before the deadline had passed. She needed to write all her thoughts down quickly, but, unfortunately, she did not have the widest vocabulary. She mustered all of the fanciest words she knew and threw it all together in a last desperate attempt at making a good grade and turned it in, barely making the deadline. This freshman girl, who wants to remain anonymous, did not realize that she had filled her paper to the brim with online abbreviations.

“The age of social networking has come, and with it, an almost illiterate rebellion,” sophomore Rummel Medina said. “The proof is all over the internet. Nobody is writing in complete words or sentences anymore. Abbreviations have taken over the way people text and type, and soon it’ll start affecting how they write in class.”

Yet many teachers do not seem affected by this phenomena. In fact, several teachers have used this as an opportunity to remain in sync with a new generation of students.

“I try to show my students I’m adapting with the Smart Board, the iPad, my iPhone, and allow them to use all these technologies, but I want them to see I am still reading good books,” English II teacher Marcia Simmons said. “Students seem to be reading less and less, and so their verbal communication skills and vocabulary skills certainly are not where they should be.”

However, English teachers have said that they do not see grades being dramatically affected. Grammar mistakes and needless abbreviations tend to happen more in homework and not in important essays. Therefore, many students believe that as long as they spell check their essays it is not an important issue.

“For three or four years I’ve seen ‘u’ in students papers, or ‘b/c,’ so we’ve had to have a conversation about modes, and how only formal English is appropriate for literary analysis, whereas a personal narrative with dialogue could have more informal language,” Simmons said.

Students have asked if something like small grammar errors or simple contractions could affect the world outside of school in any way.

“Generally on this topic, I would remind students that we are judged by society as a whole by our ability to communicate. A business man or woman would not communicate to his colleagues in misspellings if he wanted to keep his position,” English II teacher Nancy Allen said. “There is a time and place for formal English and times and places for the brevity of texting.”