Blog for Sunday, September 22

Ruchell Todd
Eng 326
22 September 2007

Texting Lingo Fails with Educators
Spokesman Review
Published September 17, 2007

While emailing, I tend to not capitalize words or to punctuate correctly (my favorite phrase is “…” which I do not routinely use any other time than on the net. I also went through a phase in high school when I did not capitalize the word “I” because I thought it was cuter when I could dot the top with a heart or a star. I had a teacher approach me about my self-esteem issues because—obviously—if I constantly left “I” in lower case it meant that I thought poorly of myself. The confrontation quickly took care of my capitalization issues in my school writing (which, I should say, I never used in any of my formal English papers), but my email habits persist. Just as if I am using my cell phone to text message a friend, I use shortcuts like “2morrow” to say tomorrow.

Keeping this in mind, I once had an English instructor who said that emailing and chatting would be the downfall of the language in its written form. He claimed that it was ruining people’s ability to use proper grammar. He was wrong. As it turns out, texting has become the language’s biggest threat. You may think that no students would be silly enough to let instant messaging sneak into their scholarly writing. This is not so, according to a recent article I read in the Spokesman Review. Students are beginning to use common “texting lingo” in their classes.

When I first read the headline, I expected to read about high school students who were writing papers the way they text, and high school Language Arts teachers wondering what to do about it. And it does talk about high-schoolers, who may not fully understand why a style of writing is deemed appropriate for one form of written communication, but not others. However, this article also focuses on college students who make these common mistakes in the papers they turn in for their college classes.

It may just be me, but I feel that these mistakes are a little more tolerable for younger kids. You use “4” for “for” and “btw” for “by the way” to save time and space. They are shortcuts. To me, seeing this in a formal writing paper would signal carelessness and laziness. One student replied that she was so used to using “texting lingo” that she “didn’t even think about it.” Granted, this was a high school student and not a college one, but college students are making similar mistakes. I would not accept a paper from one of my high school students that they “didn’t even think about” and I sure as hell wouldn’t accept a college paper. In my opinion, one of the main purposes of school is to learn critical thinking and if using these kinds of shortcuts enables you to not think, the purpose is being defeated. In high school, you do not choose to be there. In college, if you are not here to think about what you are doing and only want to take shortcuts, you shouldn’t be wasting your time or money on something you do not care about.

Whew…if I don’t stop myself I’ll get into an angry rant about kids who drink on Tuesdays and come to class hungover (I used the ellipses on purpose, BTW). We won’t go there. Am I being too harsh? This is just something that feels like it should be common sense.

On a final note, the article listed an index of terms commonly used in texting, most of which I have never heard of. This is decidedly an uncool adult trying to be cool and relate to kids—and failing pretty miserably. I would also like to point out that the author of the article does not include “LMAO” in the article, which of course means “laughing my ass off” and is one of my favorites. I’ve also commonly seen this as “LMFAO.” I’ll let you figure out what the F stands for if you don’t already know.