Joy of text messages as student gets PhD

Caroline Tagg has become the first person in Britain to get a degree in text messaging. The 33-year-old student was awarded a PhD in English from Birmingham University for her 80,000-word thesis on the study of SMS text messaging language.

For her research, Caroline read 11,000 text messages containing 190,000 words, sent by 235 people.

For three years she studied spelling, grammar and abbreviations used in social and business texts. The average text has 17.5 words.



She said: “I undertook the investigation because there is a great moral panic about the damage texting is having on the written language as well as the effect on children, who use text more than adults.”

But she found texting is good for you: “It is a creative form of communicating with each other. It is not bad grammar to text or a bad use of the English language.”

Tutor Professor Sue Hunston, who admits she can’t text, said: “Every stage of the English language has been studied. Now Caroline has studied its use in texts.”