Text Literacy

In Michaela Cullington’s essay titled, “Does Texting Affect Writing?” the author tests the ongoing question of how today’s youth handles the effects of texting in the education system. Using successful evidence from both sides of the argument as well as participating in her own experiment, Cullington is able to fully demonstrate how texting does not interfere with today’s students and their abilities to write formally in the classroom.

Texting is helping teens all over America improve their writing and language skills. According to the passage, Text- Speak Can Help Students, “ Researchers at Coventry University in the United Kingdom asked children to write text messages that described different situations. The children who texted often had a better vocabulary. Also, they could express their thoughts in writing easily than children who did not text regularly.” Of course, students are able to do something called, “code switching” which means they know when to use text talk and when to be formal. Seventy- five percent of teenagers text. In recent years, text messaging has become the predominant mode of communication for the typical American teenager.

In today’s society, digital technology became an important part of our daily lives. Advanced technologies such as smart phones, improved the connection and engagement with people around the world, and easily accessed information throughout the internet. However, many critics argued that these technology are causing negative influences among teenagers; for instances, many pointed out that texting affect the way we think and write, in which I strongly disagreed. There are no connection or comparison among texting and writing.

Text messaging is now the most popular form of daily communication between adults, new figures show. Text messaging has overtaken speaking on a cellphone and up close and personal contact as the most-utilized strategy for every day correspondence in the middle of loved ones (Grant & Meadows 2014). The first text message was sent on December 3, 1992 by Neil Papworth, a 22 year old engineer from his personal computer. The text message read “Merry Christmas.” Omnipoint Communications, the principal GSM transporter in America, set up the first text messaging service in the United States. Omnipoint not long after offered the primary messaging between the US and whatever remains of the world, beginning a 160 character smaller scale

Texting allows us to stay in touch with others in a most efficient way. We type a quick text, hit send, and in a matter of seconds our recipient has our text. Receiving a text is fast, but typing out a clear, concise

Katie Hafner’s article, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll,” displays that the rising number of texts sent by adolescents day in and day out is starting to take a big toll on them, their lifestyle, and the people around them. To start off, in the first part of the article Hafner expresses that the point of the first section is that with a growing number of young people utilizing texting and using it nonstop texting is causing serious issues such as anxiety, failing grades, distraction in school, sleep issues and many others. The author exclaims in the section that, “The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.”

In recent discussion of, “Does Texting Affects Writing” by Michaela Cullington, one view is that texting has a negative impact on teens and their writing. Cullington shows both sides of what students, teachers, and professors have to say about the issue of texting; yet after research this belief may not prove to be true. Then she writes about personal experience regarding the issue.

December in nineteen ninety-two, the first text message was sent. Believe it or not, texting was not meant to be a communication method like it is used now to replace voice messages. According to Crystal David, “It was originally conceived as having commercial use, or possibly as a service for mobile phones to signal the arrival of a voicemail message.” As anyone can see today cell phones have become a staple in our everyday lives. However there comes a point where cellular devices have become a hindrance, especially in a high school education setting. If you are a parent I am most certain you’d want to be sure that your high school child

When most people think about teen literacy, they refer to texting. Most people think that texting harms teenagers, but in reality it does not. Text messaging is perhaps one of the things people do most daily, especially teenagers. These days teens are nearly inseparable from their phones. Teenagers are growing with an increasing rate with these cell phones. Teens depend on their cell phones to get through day to day things dealing with personal and professional lives. Although when people think about texting, it is not a bad thing. It has its pros and cons, and to think it has more pros than anything. Texting is very much influenced by advancement in technology. Experts say that technology has put a new emphasis on writing and reading in today 's generation. Technology also adds new layers to understanding and what is means to be literate. It requires the combination of manual, visual, and cognitive attention. Texting helps our communication skills, language skills, writing skills, and classroom skills.

In the Mobile Data Association press release of February 2009, it was stated that 78.9 billion text messages were sent in 2008 alone. This is a staggering increase from the 41.8 billion just two years previous. With OFCOM revealing 49% of 8-11 year olds now have their own mobile phones and 82% of them are regular texters, it seems the craze is fixed on an upward trend and Humphreys’ culprits are now starting younger than ever before. The 38% year on year growth from 2007 to 2008 demonstrates texting to be one of the few areas seemingly unaffected by the World-wide credit crunch. This may be because in comparison to phone calls and multi-media messaging, texting is a cheap means of communication, particularly with phone companies now

Likewise, it made sense to trust that young people’s inclusion in texting with their friends who use textisms might have assumed a negative part too. With the majority of the data that has been assembled from all of the studies and displayed in this paper, it appears as though there are some clashing results. A number of studies recommend that using textisms in text messaging negatively affects one's education abilities, while others propose that messaging does improve literacy skills. After studying all the informations gathered, I am under the opinion that text messaging is adaptive and supplementary rather than necessarily

Text messaging has lead to many teenagers to become iliterate. With more teens resorting to texts and emails to communicate with others the literacy is changing over time.

For generations, several forms of digital communication have been developing among the human population. E-mailing, social networking, and video face calling have been major impacts of communication and have been revolutionized across the globe, but text messaging has been the leading form of human communication among the population, specifically the teenage population. Adolescent teenagers have been able to use text messaging by interacting much faster with their friends, including some that are long distant away from them. This has also lead teenagers to interact using fewer words and more jumbles of letters that suppose to mean something, such as “TTYL”

Interactions have gone from face to face to everlasting and constant conversations (Acton, 2013). Another detriment of the mobile phone is that it encourages impersonal communication. The youth’s ability to text allows the user to be in a conversation without showing personal emotion (Abayneh, 2013). It has become a norm for the youth of today to sit down at the dinner table while plopping their mobile phone next to their plate. Then proceeding to check it every few minutes despite the real life conversation going on around them (Tam News Staff, 2011). According to Phillips (2015), when he was a teenager, “We had to sit down at the dinner table and talk, there was no getting out of it”. Phillips (2015) says the Baby Boomer’s only talked to their friends when they saw them face to face, had good verbal grammar and abbreviated words on a very rare basis. Generation Z is lacking the grammar skills needed as while texting, they abbreviate. ‘Slanguage is the abbreviations teenagers use (The Free Dictionary , 2015). For example, cray-cray is slanguage for crazy. This negatively impacts on the writing skills of the today’s youth and has changed the way teenagers communicate with their peers (Ain,

The primary purpose of the present research was to gain a better understanding of how text messaging has affected adolescent (teenagers) communication skills. This study focuses on some of the effects and likely problems arising out of the use of these text messaging. Texting is the preferred mode of contact for nearly all social and communication activities, socialization and self-expression of the adolescents. They are also the quickest to adopt text messaging. In today’s world everyone in and around us are using mobile phones every day. Children today are receiving cell phones at an age as young as eight years old; more than 35 percent of children in second and third grade have their own mobile phone. Because of this, the texting language is integrated into the way that students think from an earlier age than ever before. They shorten words by using symbols to represent the word or symbols whose name sounds like a syllable of the word such as 2day or b4. This is commonly used in other languages as well.