Texting Effect On Literacy

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“Buzz buzz!” Everyone is familiar with the vibration of their simple, yet sudden notification that you have just received a text. Texting is a quick way of sending and receiving information, good or bad; is this adept way of communicating having an acute long-term effect on our literacy? David Crystal a professor at the University of Wales known for his work in English language studies and linguistics. He wrote the essay “2b or Not 2b”, and in his work he claims that texting helps rather than hinders literacy (337). From this perspective, he reminds us that abbreviations have been around for ages, even before texting; he gives the example of Eric Partridge and his Dictionary of Abbreviations that has many SMS looking examples. Later he also …show more content…

We spend on average two hours a day texting and usually the texts are no more than 180 characters, because we want to fit as much information as possible into as small a space by pressing the least amount of buttons. We are the generation that communicates through technology but we have also become the laziest generation, because we claim to not have enough energy or time to put a period at the end of our mainly abbreviated sentence. Basically, we have trained our eyes and brains to read very limited, so when it comes to reading big books we skim through them resulting in not being the best readers. Texting also causes lousy grammar, even with autocorrect we do not improve our vocabulary. Not to mention, the effect it has on our speaking and listening, as young people increasingly become connected to phone screens and avoid not face-to-face contact. As a result, we have become so acquainted to texting language we sometimes mistakenly say the abbreviation out loud, as I am sure everyone has heard the terms OMG, WTF, and LOL; speaking that gibberish out loud and causing other bigger picture issues like communication gaps between generations. Also, listening is another essential tool for learning but since most of the young people today text even during class we end up missing the important information. For these reasons, I think that texting does have a negative effect on

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