The Usage of Textisms Is Not Causing Illiteracy

Kate Hafner’s article, “Texting May Be Taking a Toll” claims that texting is an issue to teenagers around the world. As an illustration, Hafner starts the article by identifying that teenagers send a drastic amount of texts in their everyday lives. according to the Nielsen Company, “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008”(1). This is just one of the examples of many that portrays teenagers around the world send many text messages. Along with teenagers sending many texts a day, hafner also shows in this article that texting is affecting teenager's life in many different ways for example, preventing teenagers' way of becoming independent. Just as professor Turkle presented,

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 addition, Eric Partridge published a Dictionary of Abbreviations in 1942. Containing many text-like examples, such as agn “again”, mth “mouth”, and gd “good”. Symbols and number in writing have been used for a long while as well. There are called rebuses and they have been used since the middle centuries to create puzzles, surnames, or conventional representation. Not only is the use of these abbreviations that we see in texting something as old as the English language itself, the criticism associated with is is also something that is as equally ancient. Crystal (2008) explains:

Texting has become more and more common among younger aged children from about ages twelve to seventeen. As new phones begin to develop young kids have the urge to buy them to appear cool to their surrounding peers. In an ebook, Discourse of Text Messaging: Analysis of SMS Communication, written by Caroline Tagg reads this, “In 2010 it was estimated that 200,000 text messages were being sent every second, a three fold increase from 2007(Tagg p2). And it has also been calculated, by Ben Parr, that, “the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month(Parr).” This is an insane amount of texts. But little do these young teens know how this is greatly impacting their reading, writing, and speaking skills . Texting at a young age is very serious, is negatively affecting children’s literacy, and many of the problems that come with younger aged texting can easily be avoided.

Most teens nowadays communicate via text messages. Why does the world need texting ? We could easily talk face to face, or talk on the phone with the person we are needing to contact. Many people do not think about how easy it is to misunderstand someone while contacting them via text. Showing emotion to a person when talking with them one on one is not a problem, however while texting showing emotions will arise a challenge; emojis just won’t cut it for everyone. The majority of Americans only uses texting today and some topics of discussion should not be talked about through texting. I strongly think texting was not the best invention to add to this world. It leads to miscommunication and the communication skills kids have today are not the

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.

Texting has revolutionized communication, possibly too much. Because of texting, people spend too much time texting than talking face-to-face. People may possibly be socially impaired or lonely from texting too much. CNN says that people text more than even taking phone calls! In a mobility poll run by TIME, 32% of all that participated said that they would rather text than talk on the phone, possibly even with people they know more than most others. People may become introverted and work badly with others. TIME has reported before that adults are perfectly fine with texting, as their social skills have already developed in their youth, but this is not so with teens. By texting and not talking, people do not develop basic conversation skills,

Nowadays, teens text each other in “Textspeak”(David Crystal’s “Texting”), where “Words are formed in which letters represent syllables, as seen in ‘b’, ‘b4’,’NE’” (David Crystal’s “Texting”). Carrie Beth Buchanan, the head of the English Department at Clay-Chalkville High School, can already see the negative effects of Textspeak in student’s writing. In her class of twenty-five students, at least half of them turned in an essay that had abbreviations or acronyms. When she asked her class why they use this informal language, most of them did not even know that they were using it, because it had become natural to them to use Textspeak in any type of writing or communication.

Around 80% of American adults have cell phones. About 70% of those American adults send or receive texts each day. “’The Pew Research Center and the American Life Project’ asked those texters in a survey how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phones.” (Smith 101)

Texting is sabotaging the youth in today’s society. Teenagers are not experiencing as much face to face interactions as they probably should be. Instead, they’re becoming more dependent on communication through texting. Many teenagers would prefer to send a text message than to make a phone call and that’s sad. Because people are so reliant on

Cell phones have been engineered over the past years to accommodate the demand of texting, such as offering a full 1QWERTY keyboard (QWERTY is the acronym that commonly describes today’s standard keyboard layout on English-language computers), and many cell phone carriers offer plans that contain unlimited texting. An example of one of this cellphones/smartphone would be the ever popular IPhone, which holds functions that enables the users to be able to call/text/email and even use special apps that give direct access to the internet or a social networking site. According to Lenhart, 77% of adults and 71% of teenagers owned a cell phone and 38% of those teenagers (12-17 years old) used their phones to text daily (30). A year later, the same survey was administered with results increasing to 54% who text daily (30). The same survey was again administered from the Pew Research Center by Lenhart in 2012 with the results increasing to 84% of Americans ages 12 and up owning a cell phone and 63% of teenagers saying they exchange text messages daily (2).

Naysayers will list several reasons why texting is killing communication in our society. Referencing disengaged teens holed up in their rooms, texting their friends instead of spending Friday night playing games with the family is undoubtedly blamed on texting; however, teens have been brooding and disengaged from their families for decades. Lorraine Buis of the Department of Family Medicine conducted a clinical trial and found texting actually increased health benefits when used appropriately. The trial followed participants in seventeen cities and tracked their health progress in

Before any research even starts, I will sit in on both the ninth grade and twelfth-grade classes with participating students seven times to become familiarized with the students and allow the students to get comfortable with me. After the participants from each class are selected, information will be gathered for each teen such as their name, age, grade, previous academic grades from seventh grade until present grade, any additional test scores on English and reading skills, as well as any formal writing assignments. Furthermore, each participant will be asked individually to fill out a questionnaire in regards to their texting habits. They will be questioned about the details of their cell phone usage, the numbers of texts they send daily, as well as how many hours they

Texting has been used well into the beginning of the 21st century, ever since mobile phones took on a much smaller approach unlike their counterparts of yesteryear; does the 80’s ring any big bells. Nowadays there is not a person in sight that does not incorporate texting in their daily routine, even though it is more commonly used by preteens and young adults. Even with texting’s rise with this particular group, so too does the complaints about how it is causing more harm than good to our nation’s youth. It is still a form of communication unlike any other; not even calling someone is as popular to our society as good old texting. In their different articles, Jeff K. Caird, Kate A. Johnston, Chelsea R. Willness, Mark Asbridge, and Piers Steel, authors of the journal article “A Meta-analysis of the Effects of Texting on Driving,” Solomon Ali Dansieh, writer of “SMS Texting and its Potential Impacts on Students’ Written Communication Skills,” and Nurul Retno Nurwulan, Bernard C. Jiang, and Hardianto Iridiastadi’s, authors of the research article, “Posture and Texting: Effect on Balance in Young Adults,” go over different negative effects that texting has on our society as a whole. While texting can have a positive effect, it appears to have more dominant negative effect on individual’s driving capabilities, causes poor written communication skills, and loss of postural stability.

Firstly, text messaging provides the best convenience for teenagers as they can facilitates faster communications within a short duration and at the affordable price (reading 2). As one teen noted, texting “allows you to do more than one thing at a time.”