Students use text-speak in job applications

Oh dear. According to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, graduates are using text-speak when they’re writing applications, with the problem particularly widespread among those who have studied technical courses, like engineering.

Shirley Alexander, a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Technology, Sydney, said recent years had seen an increase in students writing assignments in leetspeak – gaming slang, using numbers to replace certain letters, such as ‘3’ for ‘E’. But there was no hard evidence grammatical skills were in decline, she said.

It’s good to hear the academic’s take on this – a few people unable to use a spellchecker does not a grammatical decline make.