Group items tagged

We’re now in the most literate age in history.

Clare Wood, development psychologist at Coventry University

Her own study of primary schoolchildren suggested that texting improved their reading ability.

Texters, after all, are constantly practising reading and spelling. Sure, children tend not to punctuate text messages. But most of them grasp that this genre has different rules from, say, school exams.

George Orwell in 1944 lamented the divide between wordy, stilted written English, and much livelier speech. “Spoken English is full of slang,” he wrote, “it is abbreviated wherever possible, and people of all social classes treat its grammar and syntax in a slovenly way.” His ideal was writing that sounded like speech. We’re getting there at last.