Linguistic Ruin? Orz...Effect of Online Writing on Standard Literacy

摘要

Multimodal as digital literacies are,they have still been text-based.It has been a great concern that due to the popularity of speech-like writing style online,digital literacies have brought informal speech expressions into formal standard writing,and thus increasing the possibility to ruin the standard writing language.On the other hand,although there are moral panics of the survival of standard written languages,scholars and popular media show great tolerance for online languages.In addition,it has been proved that some frequent participants in digital literacies nowadays are capable of both online language and standard offline language,indicating that they are well aware of the different registers of language use and therefore of high language literacy.Furthermore,researches suggest several possible merits of digital literacies,including saving young people from social isolation and depression,providing people with more opportunities to learn new things and to practice the instructional writing,calling for thorough consideration and elaborate editing and encouraging brief and clear writing style.