The NZ Herald is the source of some great comedy today with http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10409945″>Readers’ views: Text language in exams. Everyone is outraged!

Apparently the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is going to allow txt-style abbreviations to be used in exams. But the important thing is that this won’t extend to English exams.

I’ve sent in the following comments:

People have been abbreviating written language for thousands of years. Many of the English words we write today are shorter versions of older, longer words.

Is it really such a big deal that a teenager writes “bcoz” instead of “because” in an exam answer about, say, population growth?

Being able to write clear English is still a valuable skill today, but surely the way to test this is in an English assessment, not geography or maths.

I feel like I may be set upon by a mob of angry ppl.