Emoticons are the work of Satan

Smilies and other chat room and instant message shorthand symbols are popping into formal writing performed by high school students, according to a New York Times article.

“They were astonished when I began to point these things out to them,” said Henry Assetto, a social studies teacher at Twin Valley High School in Elverson, Pa. “Because I am a history teacher, they did not think a history teacher would be checking up on their grammar or their spelling,” said Mr. Assetto, who has been teaching for 34 years.

But Montana Hodgen, 16, another Montclair student, said she was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that she often read right past them. She proofread a paper last year only to get it returned with the messaging abbreviations circled in red.

“I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on Instant Messenger that I didn’t even realize that there was something wrong,” she said. She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used instant messages. “Three years ago, if I had seen that, I would have been `What is that?’ “

The spelling checker doesn’t always help either, students say. For one, Microsoft Word’s squiggly red spell-check lines don’t appear beneath single letters and numbers such as u, r, c, 2 and 4. Nor do they catch words which have numbers in them such as “l8r” and “b4″ by default.

Spell check? This is reason enough to not let students turn in assignments that are not handwritten. They take longer to grade, but it teachers students to think about what they write before they write. Word processing makes revisions too easy to perform.

Emoticons,Smilies ,chat room,instant messages