Mobile Text Harms Written Language
I was looking through the news on Yahoo, and I found a very short article that says the popular mobile phone text messaging is having a negative impact on writing standards, especially on youth. According to the State Examination Commission, the frequency of errors in grammar and punctuation has become a serious concern. This is evidenced by the report of last year's exam performance by 15-year-olds.
In class, we talked about language and how it contains words that are gender bias and the fear of using other languages such as Spanish. This article is somehow related to that because the popular mobile phone text messaging is literately creating a new language. A language with phonetic spelling and almost no punctuation that may threaten the traditional conventions in writing.
I believe this is really a serious problem in society today. As the article pointed out, many people have cell phones and text messaging is very popular, especially among the youths. I personally know friends at the U that send messages through their mobile phones frequently. In addition, when I play online games, I notice people are typing non-dictionary words such as "gonna" instead of "going to" and many other grammatical errors. This common practice has become a habit for them and will implanted to their writings for school projects. For these reasons, I really believe this is a serious problem for kids today and will probably get worse in the future. School must increase the awareness of students and with parents' attention, hopefully kids can identify their errors or distinguish the difference between text messaging and on real writing.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070425/od_nm/ireland_texts_odd_dc;_ylt=Ag0UdT5GCjnzoL6fk_5GqgDMWM0F
Comments
I could see how this new way of writing could present a problem.
I think it was Cingular that recent had a TV ad in which the young girl was talking to her mom by saying... "omg, indb..."
Oh my gosh, it's no big deal.
Even though people that use this method of communication know that it is just casual talk, I think that if they use it too much it will become second nature to them and may start to replace using more proper grammar.
hitl, iapf....
(here is the link, it's actually pretty funny.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o
Posted by: Patrick Steidl | April 27, 2007 1:02 PM
This is really interesting because parents and other education personal put so much pressure on how TV, video game and so on have negative affect on child’s development. Therefore they forget about everything comes with package even cell phones that was thought to be at least the most positive technology. Of course after all these hours kids avoid talking to their parents or other family members and be on the phone. Despite all those now we are dealing with text messaging. On the other hand it’s kind of hypocrite for the education system to make excuse about the kids not doing well, because of text messaging everyone knows they were not meant for long comprehensive sentences. I personally think that schools should be teaching more on grammar or other writing skills. Besides how many of us went to public schools and remembers their schools having grammar class of course unless you are in ESL department where they bore you to death with “he’s and they’re� and by the time you graduate you remember that they forget to teach you how to write full essays.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 27, 2007 4:45 PM
I can attest to this article first hand. This past fall I had a teaching internship in Grand Rapids, MN. I taught anatomy to juniors and seniors, and the level of their writing skill as showcased in answers to essay questions was often appalling to me. Simple spelling errors and grammatical mix ups (there, their, etc.) were commonplace. Having gone through high school before the text messaging trend began, I was unfamiliar with the acronyms, such as idk (I don't know) which made their way into the students' answers. The ability to accurately express oneself through written communication is imperative in this day and age, with email being an integral part of business transactions and communication. If our youth lose this ability, it will negatively affect their chances of being successful in the workforce.
Posted by: Dave J | April 29, 2007 11:25 PM
This is somewhat related, but I feel that word processing programs have allowed us to be less accurate grammatically. The computer automatically fixes our mistakes. Spelling isn't as important as it used to be.
I think our dependency on the convenience of technology may create problems for future generations
Posted by: Matt Hoffner | April 30, 2007 10:28 AM