FEARS that text messaging may have ruined the ability of teenagers to write properly have been shown to be unfounded after a two-year study revealed that youngsters are more literate than ever before.

The most comprehensive comparison made of exam papers of the past 25 years has discovered that the writing ability of 16-year-olds has never been higher.

The quality of writing has also improved, said Alf Massey, head of evaluation and validation at Cambridge Assessment, the department of Cambridge University that carried out the study.

But phrases that may not have been acceptable to examiners in 1980 have crept into regular use, even by pupils awarded A* to C grades.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.

The study used samples from thousands of English language examinations sat by 16-year-olds in 1980, 1993, 1994 and 2004. Mr Massey compared students’ general written ability to express themselves accurately and clearly through a range of grammatical structures.

Vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and grammatical adequacy were then looked at.

He said: “The quality of many features of writing by school leavers has improved over the past decade.”

Looking at the 2004 papers where improvements were substantial, he said that pupils who achieved grade C in GCSEs last year had better vocabulary than those who scored a grade B in 1980. “In this example, any tendency for vocabulary to become less impressive has been reversed with a vengeance,” said Mr Massey. “The 2004 candidates either had a better vocabulary than those a decade ago or were more likely to make a conscious effort to display their best efforts in the examination.”

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