This is a study of changes in writing patterns displayed by young German adults (secondary school leavers). The study draws on two corpora, one of texts written at school in the 1990s, the other a historical corpus of essays written during the Abitur examination over a period ranging from 1881-1991. In Part One of the book ("Parlando as a Textual Phenomenon"), specific text-linguistic features of present-day texts are grouped under the heading "Parlando", described and their gradual emergence traced in the historical corpus. Part Two ("Looking for Explanations") draws on language theory, language history, sociology and theories of education to develop explanatory dimensions for the Parlando phenomenon. It transpires that it is possible to interpret the "Parlando" text pattern as an indication of a socio-communicative language change in written texts.