Nine years ago in September 2007, a newspaper article was published titled “I h8 txt msgs” arguing how texting is wrecking our language, claiming texters are “ravaging our vocabulary”. He discussed a valid point concerning how abbreviations are taking over, but I believe that John Humphrey is afraid of change and it seems to me he wants society to also stay the same.
Our technology is constantly evolving, humans constantly finding new methods to make life a bit easier. The mobile phone for example, invented in 1979, by Douglas Han is one of the many ways that has changed the way our society communicates with each other. New technology is circulating around us and we have become dependent on it, there’s not a day a human with a type of handheld device does not text. The way humans text with each other has changed since the start of text messaging and John Humphreys argues the fact that our English language is slowly fading through the forms of constant abbreviations used within our texts. An astonishing amount of 1,424 abbreviations are circulating around our texting society today and it seems that texting has evolved immensely, phrases such as “LOL” meaning laugh out loud and “K” meaning okay. I understand John Humphreys’ argument but I believe that although abbreviations are being used, it doesn’t necessarily mean the English language is dying.
While texting helps people communicate worldwide in a quick simplistic, it is a massive difference from actually talking to someone face to face. As humans we are social beings, years ago we were used to meeting each other and exchanging feelings face to face not via social media communication or “txting”. It is found that many feelings and expressions are lost through messaging when things such as emojis or abbreveations replace feelings and emotions. Whilst researching this topic I found that in 2013, in response to do you use emoji’s in message apps? 74 percent of people in the U.S. and 82 percent in China responded that they have.
Yes, some words stated in person and written through text can have immensely different meanings but I guess society are used to it now and its revolutionized our ways of communicating and has made it simplistic and precise. John Humphreys needs to realize that having a conversation through the phone is cost expensive and meeting someone face to face depending where they live is also cost expensive. An alternative to this is online messaging such as the most influential texting app of our generation WhatsApp.
World figures for texting went from 17bn in 2000 to 250bn in 2001. They passed a trillion in 2005, and now the monthly average is 26 billion messages a month, according to Verizon Wireless. Texting is gradually growing higher and higher every year and I don’t blame anyone as it has added a new dimension to language use. People have been made to believe that the dangers of texting is suffocating our use of the English language but they have been misplaced. “In one American study, it was seen that less than 20% of the text messages exchanged looked at showed abbreviation’s of any kind”. This statistic was extracted from David Crystals article.
Sending a message on a mobile phone has changed hugely. When it was first introduced, we had to press a button more than once to get to our desired letter. But now mobile phones have honestly taken a turn in the right direction and changed the texting game in a whole, with its touch-screen and qwerty keypads it has made our lives a lot easier. With our use of texts in everyday life I think our knowledge of language increases, we learn different words via auto correct, learn how to punctuate and develop our grammar, develop our spelling skills and many more. Ultimately the need to save time and energy is the whole use of texting.
The future is growing, texting has changed our lifestyle massively no doubt about it and the growing ideas we can bring to it will be more useful and educating to the way we communicate without the fear of losing our English language. Within the years that texting was introduced it seemed to develop a new aspect in life. In short, it’s simple.
January 22, 2016 at 12:07 pm
Re-read your first sentence, ‘concerning the fact’ – is this a fact? How do you know?
Be wary of phrases such as ‘we are embracing our intelligence’ – what do you actually mean by including this? How does it relate to your argument?
This is 300 words over your limit – what will you cut and why? Your third paragraph is extraordinarily long – where should it become two paragraphs (or three)?
Re-read and edit your sentence structures throughout – where can your meaning be made clearer? What words are missing? What must be omitted?