“Americans have always been informal, but now the informality of precollege culture is so ubiquitous that many students have no practice in using language in any formal setting at all,” he says. The remedy is “to restore the family dinner table to the teaching of writing – that setting which can be a very rich semiformal setting for the exchange of ideas,” he says.
Yet if writing has become less formal, it may correspond more closely with adolescents’ worlds: “The experience of writing has to be authentic,” says Steve Peha, president of the education consulting company Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., in Chapel Hill, N.C. Still, the new SAT would make him nervous. “Sitting there with the test booklet, pencil in hand, and with 25 minutes to write a fairly cogent essay on an unusual conceptual topic is pretty daunting. I’d be nervous – and I write for a living.” —Christina McCarroll —Teens ready to prove text-messaging skills can score SAT points (CS Monitor)
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OR maybe the remedy is to expect less formal writing on the test.
Whenever there's two groups with arbitrary standards, it always seems that each group insists that their way is better, and the other group should do the hard work of changing to their standard. There's always an insistence that "our way is better", regardless of whether it is or not.
* And yes, I'm aware the statement I made would be the second group insisting the first change. I don't really have any vested interest in either side, I just think that the issue is more about "we don't want to have to change" than any real argument. On the one hand, the language needs to stay cconsistent...on the other hand, languages evolve, and it's not really worth learning an "old" way of writing that 99% of people aren't going to use once they leave school.