We’ve all heard the argument: e-mail, instant messaging, and the online universe in general are killing the written word, and producing a generation of multitaskers who can’t put a simple, well-crafted, correctly punctuated sentence together. But as one linguist points out, what the internet has actually done is to get more people reading and writing than ever before, and the strange informal quirks of much of that writing are not a harbinger of literary doom. “The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences language, of course — they gathered when printing was introduced in the 15th century.”