What a challenge this era is for those who value the use of language.

The enormity of the challenge was brought home to me recently when my college-student son relayed a construction common, he said, among his texting-obsessed contemporaries.

For those of us perturbed by ending a sentence in a preposition, especially "at," it was a sobering, dismaying revelation.

It's not uncommon, my son reported (blessedly, with chagrin) for some of his correspondents to end a text message with the question, "where are you at"?

Leaving aside for a moment the horror of the "at," modern tech messaging has brought that error into the digital age.

The text messages actually look like this:

"Where are you @," marrying that modern "at" symbol, @, to the telegraphic text-message communication.

It gets worse. Sometimes the message is just "where u @?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as an anomaly, a text-messaging convention gone bad. Quantitative research, after all, is scant.

But who among us hasn't waded through an in-box full of constructions that would have, at least, made my 7th-grade English teacher, Lucille Johnson, swoon with pain? (Ms. Johnson, granted, also railed against my "chicken-scratch" handwriting, a flaw that continues to this day, Thank goodness for computers.)

Informality and casual familiarity with English language rules are a hallmark of the Web. For many, that's part of its charm as a democratic vehicle for instantly sharing the thoughts of elites and more modest citizens alike.

Nothing inherently is wrong with that. Generations have wrestled with dictionary niceties, often without success.

But for those of us who blanch at the errancy, there comes some support that maybe we are not just shouting into the hurricane.

The Chronicle of Higher Education the other day reported on a study by Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The survey, the Chronicle noted, "asked employers what skills and knowledge they wanted out of college graduates." The Chronicle compressed this as the "workplace readiness factor."

Here's what the study found, in part:

"Only one in four employers thinks that two-year and four-year colleges are doing a good job in preparing students for the challenges of the global economy."

What's most lacking, according to the study?

"What came up first," the Chronicle reported, "was a basic, long-standing skill: 'The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing.' Eighty-nine percent of employers highlighted it; 'critical thinking' and 'analytical reasoning' came in second at 81 percent."

We certainly don't want to be thought of us gray-haired traditionalists standing in the way of the modern evolution of communication -- although that may be what we are. A blog post I read last week, from a young woman who wants to be a journalist, bemused me:

"Maybe the web way of talking isn't neat around the edges the way magazines are trim and glossy and full. But the new way of sharing words and ideas is just getting formed. Like the primordial soup from which life evolved on this Earth."

She was responding to a talk by a former editor of "Harpers," that magazine once thought of as a paragon of fine writing and provocative thinking.

Maybe its legacy is disappearing, subsumed by a world in which "where are you @" is a more prevalent measure of thought. Goodness knows, language has undergone considerable evolution and survived, and we'll get through these changes, too.

Still, we're inclined to cast our vote with Mark Baurlein, a blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education who was discussing the findings of the Hart Research Associates study.

"We hear lots of talk about the rise of 'nonlinear thinking' in the Digital Age and 'interactive writing' in Web 2.0, but I take 'effectively communicating orally and in writing' as a straightforward, linear practice, one that serves best in most scientific settings. And business, too, according to my brother the actuary, who told me a while back, 'Anyone who can write is a major asset in business.'"

That, we would like to think, is so true, even in this digital age.

Bob Ashley is editor of The Herald-Sun. Contact him at (919) 419-6678 or by e-mail at bashley@heraldsun.com.