Texting — a tumultuous treehouse full of bizarre spellings, incomplete sentences and weird abbreviations — is being widely blamed for the decline of students' composition skills.

A pugnacious posse of teachers, parents and pedants, armed with ladders, ropes and hooks, wants to invade and dismantle this depraved den of linguistic degradation.

A Maryland teacher, for instance, told U.S. News and World Report that texting and other forms of social media have eroded her students' writing ability. "They do not capitalize words or use punctuation anymore," she said. "On writing assignments, any word longer than one syllable is now abbreviated to one."

But, amazingly enough, most formal academic studies of this issue have found no evidence that texting weakens students' writing ability.

A study by researchers at Marywood University in Pennsylvania, for instance, reported that texting "showed no effect, positive or negative, on student writing. Teachers' personal anecdotal experiences should not overshadow the actual evidence, which shows that texting is not interfering with students' use of standard written English."

John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, agrees. In fact, he argues that texting actually isn't writing at all, that instead it's speech, what he calls "talking with your fingers," (which angry drivers do, in a more profane way, all the time).

In McWhorter's view, texting is really a spoken conversation, full of slang, shortcuts and fragments, a style that no one would ever use in a formal speech or essay.

"People banging away on their smartphones," he writes, "are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills."

So, if there has been a general decline in students' writing proficiency, texting probably isn't the cause. While texting clearly has other serious negative consequences — distraction, shorter attention spans, bullying, car accidents, just to mention a few — the demise of writing isn't one of them. Those who blame texting for sagging compositional skills are barking up the wrong treehouse.

Educators recommend many other methods to improve writing ability — classroom exercises, one-on-one instruction, and, above all, continual practice. Al Smith once said, "The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy"; likewise, the only cure for the ills of writing is more writing.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.