It was a linguistic nightmare. Associate English professor Margaret Soltan was reading a student’s in-class assignment and nestled innocuously between arguments and analysis was a ‘lol.’

But despite the student laughing out loud, there’s (probs) no need to panic (:o) over the inclusion of texting language in a paper or two. The acronyms, emoticons and abbreviations of text talk are not replacing standard English, according to multiple academic studies and GW professors.

Soltan said bits of texting language occur only on very rare occasions and in informal settings.

“If it’s an in-class writing assignment and it’s a student that’s writing in a very relaxed, colloquial way, then maybe a student makes a mistake and is kind of embarrassed and might put ‘lol’ in parentheses,” Solton said.

Despite media myths that the use of text speak among young people has contributed to the deterioration of the English language and has had a detrimental effect on their literacy, GW professors-not to mention scholarly research on memory and literacy-say otherwise.

One such study called “R u texting? Is the Use of Text Speak Hurting your Literacy?,” which was published in the Journal of Literacy Research in 2009, found that the use of texting lingo has no effect on the literacy levels of college-age students. In their sample of 80 students from a midwestern four-year commuter university, literacy scores of self-described “texters” and “non-texters” were almost identical.

Even the notion of text speak ruining spelling practices, fears of retroactive learning of text speak interfering with standard English in the memory and claims of textisms appearing on a regular basis in secondary schools are largely unfounded.

The consensus among writing and English professors at GW seems to be that the texting-destroys-language theory is, well, all talk.

Assistant writing professor Mark Mullen, whose classes focus on themes of media and technology, said he hasn’t seen any texting lingo whatsoever in the formal writing of his students.

“I think the reason I haven’t seen it in classes is I always feel like GW students are smart,” he said. “They know they’re writing essays to me. They know that they’re not texting me. I think you’d have to be extraordinarily stupid to make that mistake. And I just don’t think that GW students are.”

Mullen said that writers make shifts in the way they communicate based on their audience. The formality of discourse, he says, depends heavily on the context.

“I find that students are good at style switching; that is, they know when to use the style of writing that is appropriate for texting and when to use a more formal written style. They cringe when they see other students trying to use one of these styles in the wrong context,” Professor Joel Kuipers, a linguistic anthropologist, said in an e-mail. “Once in a PowerPoint presentation for a class, a student put up a sarcastic bullet point, followed by ‘lol’ and several of the other students in the class rolled their eyes and shook their heads.”

Emoticons, likewise, have their uses and misuses. Professor Heather Schell, who is the director of the first-year writing program, said in an e-mail that emoticons “offer an extremely handy way to convey tone” and can be especially useful in peer reviews of writing as a way to “take the sting out of criticism.”

The occasional appearance of textisms outside the realm of cell phones, however, does not worry the writing community at GW.

“There will always be these kinds of moral panics about the effect of technology on our communication practices. Does this stuff change the way we communicate? Oh yeah. But language evolves and writing practices evolve,” Mullen said. “To expect it to do anything different is to kind of be stuck in the past.”

Variants of texting language have actually existed since the 19th century. An exhibition currently on display at the British Library features Victorian poems that contain abbreviations that closely resemble today’s texting abbreviations. An example of such emblematic poetry is Charles C. Bombaugh’s poem in “Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature.” One verse reads, “He says he loves U 2 X S,/ U R virtuous and Y’s,/ In X L N C U X L/ All others in his i’s.”

Professors are more worried about the negative learning habits associated with texting than its potential impact on writing.

“I have noticed to my irritation that there are some students who can’t control their texting in my class,” said Soltan.

In the “R u Texting?” study, self-described texters tended to have lower GPAs than non-texters.

Texting during class also represents a broader risk of overstimulation.

“Studies show that being constantly plugged in and the consequent failure to disconnect and give your brain some ‘downtime’ can inhibit the formation of memories and the integration of experience,” Kuipers said. “I think this is a greater danger than any grammatical threat from texting.” u