On a typical day, my teenage sons communicate with their friends in a number of ways that involve writing but do not require pencil and paper. They e-mail, IM, post on each others' blogs, leave text messages on each others' cell phones, and--in math class--even tap out brief dispatches on their graphing calculators.

Many of these missives do not at first appear to be written in English. They bristle with consonants-only formations like akcdnt (accident), impenetrable acronyms like ROFL (Rolling On the Floor Laughing), words containing numbers (4Tun8 = "fortunate"), clever "emoticons" ( *^_^* = blushing), and entirely letterless words (@->-->--- = "rose").

Teachers, parents, and editors of grammar texts find themselves bewildered or appalled or both at what many perceive to be the resulting deterioration of written communications. A 13-year-old who turned in a What-I-Did-on-My-Summer-Vacation essay written entirely in "text lingo" ("My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc. . . .") provoked lively debate in the local papers for weeks. College professors and word experts warn that Netspeak is systematically destroying grammar, syntax, and spelling, that certain words will eventually die out due to new patterns of usage. (Will "hello" and "good-bye" eventually be forever replaced by "hey" and "later"?)

But linguist David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet, is thrilled. He believes the various applications of new technology are leading to creative new stylistic forms and increasing the expressive range of the language. "Rather than condemning it," he says, "we should be exulting in the fact that the Internet is allowing us to once more explore the power of the written language in a creative way." According to Crystal, we are on "the brink of biggest language revolution ever."

Given that the first two language revolutions were the emergence of speech and the development of written language (around 50,000 and 6,000 years ago, respectively), the prospect of another, even bigger one is obviously a big deal. Language experts like Walter Ong tell us that human consciousness itself changed with the advent of writing. Who can say what the next revolution in words will make of us?

A really brief history of the written word
Ong called writing "a technology that changes thought." He argued that once a person can look at a representation of what she is thinking--take it out of the transient world of speech to pin it down on paper--she has an opportunity to analyze, revise, deepen, and expand her thoughts--and raise her level of consciousness. As writing became a system unto itself, separate from speech, with unique uses (legal records, religious documents, literature) and rules (spelling, punctuation, grammatical structure), written language grew more polished and formal, more divorced from the spoken language of everyday life. Literacy came to symbolize education, sophistication, civilization itself.

Then, mid-twentieth century, communications media like the telephone and radio and television broadcasting introduced an era Ong called "the second orality." As speech once again assumed dominance in mass communication, writing itself became less formal, taking on characteristics of spoken language. In 1900, the average English sentence contained 30-40 words (down from 40-70 words per sentence in 1700). Texts from the 1980s averaged about 20 WPS. Today, a complete (not to mention emotion-filled) sentence can be tapped out in four characters: I <3 U.

Come the revolution
Linguist Naomi Baron, author of Alphabet to Email: How Written Language Evolved and Where it's Heading, suggests that the relationship between spoken and written language is about to come full circle via our e-mail inboxes. Pointing to the way computer-mediated writing increasingly mirrors the characteristics of informal speech, Baron builds a case that the distinctions between written and spoken language will simply cease to exist. And she is not sure this is a good thing.

When we begin to write the way we talk, Baron says, we may begin to lose an essential aspect of our humanity. Ignoring the conventions of grammar, spelling, and composition might lead to the loss not only of clear communications, but of our reflective, analytical, reasoning selves.

"These issues spill beyond the classroom as students become adults, whose writing goes largely unmonitored. No one edits what gets sent out on the Net," Baron writes. "As our notions of writing begin merging with informal speech, we find ourselves getting into trouble. Speech that's directly written down can produce texts that are verbose, sloppy, and even irresponsible."

As an example of how using e-mail as a substitute for speech--rather than as a medium with its own editorial safeguards--can have regrettable consequences, Baron offers an outcome of the U.S. government's case against Microsoft in the late 90s. "In the wake of the revelation that e-mail messages sent by Bill Gates himself may have been less than sportsman-like in the treatment of the competition, the chief executive of one Internet-based company bemoaned the resulting new atmosphere of 'deliberation and delicacy' that 'slows down communication' when 'everyone is stopping and thinking about what they write.'"

Wait a minute, Baron says. Isn't stopping to think about what you write a good thing? If traditional writing is somehow transformative, what do we lose "as individuals, as members of communities" when writing merges with speech?

David Crystal, though, predicts more positive outcomes for the emerging revolution in language. Instead of viewing computer-mediated writing as a converging of written and spoken language, he looks at it as an entirely new medium, using properties of language that do not exist in traditional speech or writing. Think about Internet chat rooms, he says, where many people can be "talking" simultaneously and the language of the discussion that unfolds is entirely unlike anything you'll encounter at a cocktail party or in a novel. Consider the e-mail message, in which the ability to cut and paste and respond to certain points directly within the message, then forward the message to another colleague who can insert his two cents, results in language that represents collaborative thinking in a way other written media or speech can't approach.

Computer-mediated writing is giving people opportunities to play with language "to an extent not seen in English since the Middle Ages," Crystal says. Shakespeare, he notes, was not afraid to take a noun and use it as a verb, and in his writing lifetime the Bard created hundreds of words that are still in use (and in dictionaries) today.

D kdz r ll ryt, imho
I like thinking of my sons and their friends as latter day Shakespeares, using their blogs and online messaging to create a brave new language that is global and diverse and free of the kind of rhetorical cant that passes for communication in high places today. Any concerns I had about traditional writing conventions being abandoned wholesale by the Net generation were alleviated by an informal e-mail poll of my 15-year-old's classmates. Consider these responses to a question about the value of punctuation:

• It's good to give the reader a break so they can decipher what you're talking about.
  
• I frequently find it difficult to listen to people who use endless strings of words with no periods, commas, or even real words included in their thoughts.
  
• I use it constantly, because writing is useless without it. There can be no emphasis expressed without those things!
  
• It gives a common structure to thoughts which are perhaps not held in common.
  
• [I] have an everlasting love affair with the semicolon.

Debra Wierenga is a mother, poet, and frequent contributor to jugglezine.