Researchers conducting the study of 1,000 mobile phone users for Woolworths, say that children"s text messages could hold the key to their future careers.
The study examined how different professions wrote text messages and divided them into four groups: creatives, jugglers, controllers and facilitators.
- Creatives (actors, designers, advertising executives and landscape gardeners, for example) used text abbreviations and slang, varied between using upper and lower case letters, and had phones with customised ring tones and screen settings.
Jugglers (teachers, office workers and emergency service workers) used capitals, lower case letters and punctuation correctly, never lost their phones and tended to grip their phone between their chin and shoulder while talking.
Controllers (armed forces, lawyers and sales reps) used capitals and never abbreviated but only sent short messages.
Facilitators (nurses, nannies, personal assistants) always used lower case and added characters like smiley faces.
As psychologist Sidney Crown says "As fewer and fewer teens are using the written word nowadays, there is some validity in looking to other ways of determining the type of person they are, particularly with regards to what kind of job they are likely to be best suited to,". Sidney also points out that a text message style can be as individual and revealing as handwriting.