Jennie Said:

Word order in the written English language?

We Answered:

Talk about artful syntax used by the greats (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Clemens, Ernest Hemingway).

Talk about anastrophe and its effect.

Julio Said:

Is text messaging ruining the written English language?

We Answered:

This is a common myth often relayed by high-school teachers and is often based on anecdotal evidence rather than on any peer-reviewed investigation. The few studies that have been done on IM communication and texting suggest that users actually have a keen command of both formal and informal varieties of English and are quite comfortable manipulating the them as the context requires. A recent study of a 1.5 million word corpus of IM data shows that only 2.44% of the tokens (ie, 2.44% of the words) are IM-style abbreviations (lol, brb, meh, etc.). Further research shows that IM communication is more closely related to speech rather than to written communication - not surprising considering the real time nature of IM and texting.

There's an informative summary in a University of Toronto publication (Idea&s), volume 3, number 2 here:

http://www.ideasmag.artsci.utoronto.ca/

Here's a direct link to the paper (it's only one page, so take a look!):

http://www.ideasmag.artsci.utoronto.ca/i…

Also, David Crystal has written a couple of books on this issue:

Language and the Internet. CUP. 2006
Txting: the gr8 db8. OUP. 2008