How Does Texting Affect Writing By Michaela Cullington Summary

In the article, “Does Texting Affect Writing?”, the author Michaela Cullington conveys her speculation that texting does not correlate to how students write formal essays. At the beginning of the article Cullington introduces the term texting and the convenience texting brings. Later expressing her concern that the texting language “Textspeak” is actually affecting students writing; then contradicts these views by using primary and secondary sources (news articles, books, her own surveys and research). In addition, she uses an anecdote to tell of her own experience with texting and writing. Together with other evidences and research put together, she uncovers the debate between textspeak and formal writing. On the basis of her research, she concludes that the state of texting does not interfere with writing or writing abilities.

I like the way Michaela Cullington starts off giving a strong and clear introduction about the ways we use texting in our daily lives.

With that way of starting her paper, it connects her readers instantly, which is did to me. In addition, inserting the two different views on the issue of texting at the beginning really helps the reader start thinking deeply about the issue. Her paper could have been exceptional, but the main drawback was her research and evidence. Her research and evidence was quite limited, only basing evidence on personal experiences, students and professors she knew. So actually beneath it all she could be interviewing people that would claim the same view that she has on texting. If I was conducting my own experiment, I would ask random people instead of close friends because there won’t be

biased.
Another way to have made the paper more successful was to look more at common academic abbreviations. The case is that she mainly focused on “text speak” language like “gtg” or “lol” and these are not words that we would normally use in an academic paper. Instead I would prefer her to focus more on the grammar aspect and words, we will actually use in our paper, like people in their papers sometimes write “through” as “thru”, using shorthanded without noticing. To conclude these are couple areas where her evidence and research undermines her overall paper.
After the discussion in class, there is one thing that made me think deeper about the way and format we write depends on the tool we are using. I think that our brain automatically learns to discern whether to use text speak or academic writing based on the tool. For instance, when we text on our phone, we are bound to use text speak; but when we use computer our brain turns to academic work mode. This phenomenon is quite interesting actually and how amazing our brain works.