for many students, schoolwork looks like this :)

NEW YORK -- It's nothing to be LOL about: Despite best efforts to keep school writing assignments formal, two-thirds of teens admit in a survey that emoticons and other informal styles have crept in.

(That's "laughing out loud," by the way -- or "BTW.")

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Thursday, also found that teens who keep blogs or use social-networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace have a greater tendency to slip nonstandard elements into assignments.

The results may give parents, teachers and others a big :( -- a frown to the rest of us -- though the study's authors see hope.

"If you find that in a child's or student's writing, that's an opportunity to address the differences between formal and informal writing," said Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew. "They learn to make the distinction ... just as they learn not to use slang terms in formal writing."

Half of the teens surveyed say they sometimes fail to use proper capitalization and punctuation in assignments, while 38 percent have carried over the shortcuts typical in instant messaging or e-mail messages, such as "LOL." A quarter of teens have used :) and other emoticons.

Overall, 64 percent have used at least one of the informal elements in school.

Those who consider electronic communications with friends as "writing" are more likely to carry the informal elements into school assignments than those who distinguish between the two.

The study was co-sponsored by the National Commission on Writing at the College Board, the nonprofit group that administers the SAT and other placement tests.

As the English language evolves, some e-mail conventions, such as starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice, said Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve the teaching of writing.

"I think in the future, capitalization will disappear," said Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he told The New York Times, when his own teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

The telephone-based survey of 700 U.S. residents ages 12 to 17 and their parents was conducted Sept. 19 to Nov. 16 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.