![]() For starters, texting’s economic impact is significant: The industry that supports texting’s infrastructure is a lucrative business that employs many people. Texting offers society many positive benefits. Or, as Crystal states, “Texting is one of the most innovative linguistic phenomena of modern times.” Texting should be respected and taken more seriously as a sophisticated form of discourse that has the potential to revolutionize how we write and our overall relationship to language. Texting is a “new way of writing” that we can use alongside traditional writing and “an expansion of linguistic repertoire,” marking a new type of bilingualism that reflects a positive development in our constantly evolving linguistic selves. However, as linguist John McWhorter claims, texting is a “miraculous thing” that marks “an emergent complexity” with how we use language. ![]() In general, these arguments make this clear: Texting is a major threat to our literacy skills. Texting also shortens attention spans and distracts significantly when engaging in otherwise important, necessary activities such as reading, working, or driving. ![]() (For a counterargument to this bad idea, see Scott Warnock’s chapter elsewhere in this collection.) Given the often-limited space texters have to compose messages (like Twitter’s 140-character limit), many argue that texters’ abilities to compose complex, well-supported arguments is dwindling. Nevertheless, according to these positions, texting causes people, especially children, teenagers, and college students, to misspell words, poorly punctuate sentences, and grammatically pollute sentences. The examples of these doomsday scenarios are too pervasive to fully review here. Additionally, in a 2014 Los Angeles Times article, a columnist argues that texting produces linguistic and intellectual laziness, predictability, and desperation. More troubling, the article begins with these words, “It probably comes as no surprise to those of us who have read our kids’ composition papers,” and ends with these, “OMG! One more challenge to teaching our kids to write!” Both comments suggest that texting is a major problem causing students to write poorly, a position that oversimplifies and overlooks numerous other important factors that influence how people, especially students, write. Unfortunately, the myth has continued into the present: In a 2012 Baltimore Sun article, the author reports on a study from Pennsylvania State University that found texting negatively affects students’ grammar skills. As David Crystal points out in his book Txtng: The gr8 db8, headlines like these from the mid-2000s have become the norm for how many people understand texting: “Texting and Emailing ‘Fog Your Brain like Cannabis’” “Texting Does Not Influence Literacy Skills” and “Texting Deprives Children of Sleep.” Due to this popularity and the unconventional ways texters use language, a potent public backlash against texting has emerged, propagated further by the media and other cultural elites. ![]() According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 75% of Americans in 2011 sent and received text messages. Texting became commercially available for the public in the mid-1990s, and since then, its popularity has skyrocketed. One who texts is generally referred to as a texter, and although texts are often composed with alphabetic letters, texters are using an increasingly more sophisticated range of visual and sonic media to communicate through this medium. Text messaging, or texting, refers to the communicative practice of sending brief messages on cell phones, other personal digital devices, or online instant messaging services using conventional, but more often abbreviated, graphic, or otherwise non-conventional uses of language. \)Īuthor: Christopher Justice, University of Baltimore
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |