Texting Epidemic

Does texting make us bad writers?

This has been a question that people have been asking for years. As texting became more and more common place, people started using shorthand and soon a whole texting language emerged. But does it make us bad writers?

Looking back at some of my old Facebook posts, or old texts, can sometimes be cringe worthy. In middle school I thought it was so cool to use the text shorthand, or add extra letters to words. It's how all of my friends talked, and so it's how I talked. But I realized in high school that I was representing myself in a way that I didn't like. I didn't want to look uneducated or like I didn't know how to type. So I stopped using texting lingo and started typing everything out. No more "idk" or anything like that. I used proper grammar. But so many teens and kids text now, and they usually use short hand. As a result I've seen elementary school kids put "idk" for "I don't know" in their written work in class, and have seen other results of texting. But one thing about texting is that it forces us to be more expressive. We have to type in a way where the other person can understand how we mean our words. Reading a message is more difficult than hearing it, how can we get across our sarcasm or emotion? We learn to be more expressive and and to get our message across.

Texting has had different effects on our writing, both negatively and positively. It hasn't necessarily made us bad writers, but it has brought new hurdles into the classroom.

I never considered that texting is just an extension of how we are speaking, and not actual writing. Texting is fingered speech and thus is something that we do not spend a lot of time thinking or reflecting over, it is something that flows. Like speech we are not overly concerned about grammar, and this is definitely something we see daily in texting. After listening to the TED Talk video, I can definitely see that texting is different than writing and consequently does not make us bad writers. A point from the video that I really loved was that people, even presidents of colleges, have been complaining about youth's grammar and spelling for hundreds of years. It is not something that is only now occurring just because of texting. It is something we will probably continue to complain about for the next hundred years and should not be blamed on texting and technology.