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Out of 700 youth aged 12-17 who participated in the phone survey, 60 percent say they don't consider electronic communications - e-mail, instant messaging, mobile text - to be writing in the formal sense; 63 percent say it has no impact on the writing they do for school and 64 percent report inadvertently using some form of shorthand common to electronic text, including emotions, incorrect grammar or punctuation

to excuse bad writing by saying it's just how their world is now "is ignoring the fact that formal communication is still important and necessary."

Many struggle with the formal writing process

+ Negative Aspects of Text Messaging  Text messages have their benefits, but also have negative aspects that can be harmful.  With everyone feeling the need to be extremely connected to their phones today, they often have issues if they do not have their phone with them.  Teenagers are having trouble focusing in school and have even been facing problems focusing in everyday life as they feel the need to be attached to their phone 24/7.

+ School & Text Messaging  Students today feel that they can often multi-task while doing school work, talking to friends online, and texting.  They do not see that this is affecting their school performance when they do not devote the time to study and focus on their homework for a certain amount of time without constantly being in touch with their friends.  Parents have tried to limit the time that their children can limit their cellular devices, but it is becoming harder as they technology is continuing to grow.

Text Messaging & School (cont.)  Constant text messaging has become a concern to doctors & psychologists as they fear that constantly texting is leading to the downfall in school.  Grades, performance, and stress are some of the concerns as teenagers are often putting off projects until the last minute in order to complete them. This is leading to not as good of quality in their projects are worse and they are often unable to complete them fully.

Little or no grammar teaching, cell phone texting, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write.

require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills. Almost a third of those students are failing.

Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.

The common thread in these disabilities is the division of attention. The richness of our thoughts, our memories and even our personalities hinges on our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory," writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Such associations are essential to mastering complex concepts. When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory. In an article published in Science last year, Patricia Greenfield, a leading developmental psychologist, reviewed dozens of studies on how different media technologies influence our cognitive abilities. Some of the studies indicated that certain computer tasks, like playing video games, can enhance "visual literacy skills," increasing the speed at which people can shift their focus among icons and other images on screens. Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and "more automatic" thinking.

In one experiment conducted at Cornell University, for example, half a class of students was allowed to use Internet-connected laptops during a lecture, while the other had to keep their computers shut. Those who browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well they retained the lecture's content. While it's hardly surprising that Web surfing would distract students, it should be a note of caution to schools that are wiring their classrooms in hopes of improving learning. Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved,

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not,

"If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet