Teens use emoticons in school

Someone posted this article on Twitter.

It’s nothing to LOL about: Despite best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.

ZOMG ROFL!!1! 1337!

The chairman of the commission’s advisory board, Richard Sterling, said the rules could possibly change completely within a generation or two: Perhaps the start of sentences would no longer need capitalization, the way the use of commas has decreased over the past few decades. “Language changes,” Sterling said.

PWN!

But seriously, what makes a piece of writing "formal" is whether or not we choose to call it "formal" ... well, ok, it's more of an emergent property that requires the agreement of a significant number of people, but you get the point. The rules of language do not come from God. XD