Is Text Messaging Killing English?

According to an Irish education commission, the prevalence of texting among school-aged children is causing problems with real language skills, what with its capitalization, punctuation, and spelling rules.

No need to panic yet: There's not a lot of science behind this claim, merely an observation that errors in grammar are on the rise among 15-year-olds, arguably the cream of the text-messaging crop. The story notes: The report laments that, in many cases, candidates seemed "unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary."

Yep, sounds like texting.

Of course, we've heard these complaints before from other technology developments: The spell check and autocorrect features in Microsoft Word have been blamed for killing the ability to spell. Instant messaging and email have both been blamed for the same kind of impact on writing ability as texting has: causing choppy sentences and limiting word choices to the words with five letters max.

Is text messaging the straw that will break the camel's back, worse than the other grammar-destroying technologies we've been faced with? U B TH3 JUJ!

LINK: Text messages harm written language?