The amount of French text messaging related to spelling level: why some letters are produced and others are not?

All spellers do not modify randomly when they use Digital Writing in Instant Messaging. Some letters are written, not written or replaced and we tried to provide in-depth understanding of the underlying reasons for the phenomenon. One could choose to type the word “arrête” with one “r” (since all the other letters have a basic value, or the most frequent value) as s/he may consider the other “r” as useless (since it has a zero value). Students wrote two dictations: the first on a sheet of paper; the second on an instant messaging website. Results showed that students rarely modified letters with a base value, but mainly modified other letters (e.g. with a zero value). As a conclusion, the fact that adolescents preserved, replaced or did not write letters according to their value proves that the use of modifications (or textism) in French does not leave anything to chance: it is based on the spelling system itself.