"Woe un2mnkind' wraps up a famous passage from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Translated, it says, " Woe unto mankind."

Dot Mobile, a company offering mobile phones to students, has hired Professor John Sutherland of University College London to provide subscribers with text message summaries and quotes from literary classics. "We are confident that our version of ‘text’ books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy," Dot Mobile said in a press release."

The plan will initially be tied to national curriculum and university course texts, but Dot Mobile has wider ambitions, including a complete, shrunken works of Shakespeare.

Quoted in The Age newspaper, Professor Sutherland said texting was an underused but promising educational resource. "Take the dot mobile ending to Jane Eyre, for example - MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus," he said. "Was ever a climax better compressed?"

The shorthand will meet several ergonomics criteria if it is easy to learn and widely comprehensible. Will it achieve its goals of making the classics easier to learn and raising educational standards? That is the question.

Sources: The Age; Dot Mobile

Editor’s note: The issue of whether the new texting shorthand is easily learned and comprehensible relates to several articles on cognitive ergonomics in The Ergonomics Report™ ergonomicsreport.com, a publication for subscribers with a professional interest in ergonomics and human factors.