Phones are damaging English

Having grown up with instant messaging and texting, I don’t bat an eye at slang as diverse as “irlol” (or “in real life laugh out loud”) and “iucmd” (my friend Matt’s favorite, meaning “if you catch my drift”). Yet I was shocked a few weeks ago when my dad sent me a text message for the first time. It read “miss yu, yu have pro status as spanish tutor lv dad.” I had helped my 14-year-old brother Sam study for a Spanish exam over Christmas break, and it was nice to be informed he did well. However, I was more interested in those dropped vowels. I love my dad, but I don’t consider him to be the most culturally adept person. He uses email, but I’ve always found his communication there to be very precise. As recently as a few months ago my brother was still showing him how to open the text messages he had received, so I wasn’t prepared for his sudden embrace of text slang.

As amusing as my dad’s text was, I know that he can read and communicate well in English after over 20 years of formal education. However, students Sam’s age have lived with the constant sending and receiving of texts and IMs in a way that even current college students did not experience. My experience may be outside the norm, but I didn’t have a cell phone until I was well into high school. Now I hear of kids in elementary school having their cell phones confiscated by teachers who catch them texting. Sam recently had his texting privileges canceled after 10:30 p.m. when my parents found him sending messages until 5 a.m.

All of this communication through the short bursts of text messages is reshaping the way we process English. I recently had a professor exclaim that “text signaling” was appearing in some students’ essays, whether conscious or not. Every word should be spelled out fully. If that has to be clarified at Georgetown, I can’t imagine what it must be like to grade middle school English papers. And according to a study by The Pew Internet and American Life Project, 64 percent of surveyed teenagers acknowledged that “breezy shortcuts and symbols commonly used in text messaging have appeared in their school assignments.”

While these cosmetic changes are not ideal, most teachers note that “text speak” can  easily be corrected in students’ papers. A report from the University of Alabama identifies a more disconcerting problem: students are having a harder time adding the supporting details and descriptive phrases that are critical components of successful writing. The authors of the Alabama study argue that young students are writing statements with reduced linguistic development because they’re used to getting the job done with as few sentences as possible, an attitude that is transferred to the classroom. One hundred and eighty characters don’t give you a lot of room to fully develop thoughts. In fact, it forces you to do exactly the opposite.

Although I don’t claim to have the answer to the dilemma posed by new forms of electronic communication, it is interesting to see both sides of this very useful technology. The speed and ease with which my dad can message me is well worth the four vowels it cost him, but if that’s the only way the next generation can communicate, we’re in trouble. My one suggestion for avoiding that fate would be to continue stressing the importance of reading great books to young students. Such exposure to great authors and their ideas (not mention full-length words) provides a grounding that makes the transition between “text speak” and formal academic writing navigable. Humans have been struggling to reconcile formal and informal modes of communication long before the creation of cell phones, but as the 18th century author and poet Samuel Johnson noted, “the greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write.” Or, as my dad might now say, “put down ur cell and pick up a gr8 book iucmd.”