The future of written English will owe more to Hollywood films than Dickens or Shakespeare, if the findings of a study into children's writing are anything to go by.

如果一项对儿童作文的研究结果可靠的话，那么比起狄更斯或莎士比亚的影响，书面英语的未来受好莱坞电影的影响会更大。

The analysis of 74,000 short stories found that their written work was littered with Americanisms, exclamation¹ marks and references to celebrities².

Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage, trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda³, cranky（古怪的） and flashlight.

The stories, written by pupils aged⁴ seven to 13, show how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a tuxedo⁵.

'Smart' is now often used for 'clever' and 'cranky' for 'irritable⁶'.

Celebrity⁷ culture also has a powerful influence on children's work, with Simon Cowell and Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names cropping up repeatedly.

But pupils are let down by basic spelling, punctuation⁸ and grammar, according to the study by Oxford⁹ University Press, which looked at the entries to BBC Radio 2's '500 Words' competition.

Children stumbled over simple spellings such as 'does' and 'clothes' and struggled to use the past tense correctly, often saying 'rised' instead of 'rose' or 'thinked' instead of 'thought'.

Researchers also found that punctuation was underused, especially semi-colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital letters.

However, exclamation marks were overused. Researchers found 35,171 examples in total, with some young writers using five at a time.

The study of more than 31million words will be compared with future research to see how written language evolves.

Popular US fiction such as the Twilight¹⁰ vampire¹¹ novels and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling.

Modern technology was also influential¹². Out of almost 300 references to 'blackberry', nearly half referred to mobile phones.