According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.

Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”

“Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”

“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do

Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.

“I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A

“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,”

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills.

To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent. "What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?" she asks.

Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none. Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser University

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, "still can't pass our simple test," she says. Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett. "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem." Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes. "Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?"

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani. "Instead of 'because', it's 'cuz'. That's one I see fairly frequently," she says, and these are new in the past five years.

"There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency," says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university's director of academic advising. Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fr

"because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

"The words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' - 'definately'. I don't know why," says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.

"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra. Then he's reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.

"We haven't taught grammar for 30-40 years...(and it) hasn't worked." "It's not that hard to teach basic grammar,

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field. "I think it has," says Joel Postman, author of "SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate," who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work. "It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

"These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations," notes Postman. But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator

One only has to spend about two minutes browsing the public pages of a social media platform like Facebook to find examples of cyber slang. In some cases, a second and third read is required before a sentence begins to make sense. A public Facebook page entitled “If you think the rules at UnionCounty High School are ridiculous,” dealing with school policies in Union, S.C. offers these examples: “the new policy on dress code they handed out last week is our last chance 2 keep us out of uniforms. the new super intendant as u all know is from spartanburg is using the saturday school crap 2 take a note on how many offenses we have & will use it 2 make her decision. so we ned 2 stop breaking the dress code or we might have 2 really fight uniforms next year.” “dont worry abt us wearing uniforms nxt year. our parents wont buy them & the district cant even give us the first set cuz our parents pay the taxes & we cant afford them. so get ur parents opinion & make them disagress with uniforms!” Goli said that while examples like these demonstrate a problem, it is not one that can’t be solved.

"a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture." Entitled Reading at Risk, the report of this survey of national trends among American adults reveals that "literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young