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Humphrys, David. “I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language.” The Daily Mail. 24 Sept. 2007. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.

In his article I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language, David Humphrys rants about the how texting is “pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary.” He starts off by talking about the recent changes made to his beloved Oxford English Dictionary as part of the latest revision, namely removing the hyphen from some 16,000 words. This, he deems, is nothing more than the OED falling victim to fashion to the SMS vandals who defend their practice through ridiculing non-adapters, pointing out it saves money, and arguing that language changes. Humphrys argues we must not give in to this plague of emotions, abbreviations, and ambiguity and urges influential authoritative references such as the OED to do the same; lest our language be taken over by text-speak the same way email conquered the practice of writing letters.

Myhra, John. “Negative Effects Of Texting In The Classroom.” Tech Nation. WikiDot, 3 Dec. 2010. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.

It is very clear from Negative Effects Of Texting In The Classroom that John Myhra is not a fan of texting. His main gripe is the effect that today’s over-use of texting has had on students’ writing; making them unable to separate formal and informal english. He says the mistakes caused by texting are often unintentional — lack of critical analysis and shorter sentences to name a few — but overall causes punctuation to suffer, capital letters to shrink, and spelling to be squashed. While Myhra agrees with proponents of texting who say that it increases the amount of writing students are doing, he argues that it is writing of little to no depth filled with terrible grammar and countless abbreviations.

Trubek, Anne. "Txting 2 Lrn." Instructor 121.5 (2012): 49-51. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.

In her educational pamphlet Txting 2 Lrn, Anne Trubek discusses the benefits of texting related to education and how they can be embraced in the classroom. She starts by stating that kids today spend a lot of time texting (girls more than boys), sending an average of about 3,400 texts per month. Because of this, texting has revolutionized the way kids today communicate, and in the eyes of many, is decreasing the language skills of our young generation. Trubek adamantly points out that such views are opinion and do not listen to the countless studies show that texting increase literacy and improve spelling. She then goes on to list the several different texting facts such as: texting creates strong readers and writers, texting improves phonology, text language has historical ties, and texting does not distract students. To close, Trubek suggests various ways for teachers to embrace this new communication technology in the classroom such as: getting immediate feedback, teaching note taking shorthand, or studying historical characters by making them communicate through this new medium. 

Zurhellen, Sarah. "“A Misnomer of Sizeable Proportions”: SMS and Oral Tradition." Oral Tradition 26.2 (2011). Project MUSE. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.

In “A Misnomer of Sizeable Proportions”: SMS and Oral Tradition, Sarah Zurhellen first starts by discussing how texting as a medium of communication is encoring literary schools, bridging the gap between oral and written cultures. She then dives into the more technical side of the functional yet symbolic text-language, referencing the six non-standard language developments of texting and the 3 social maxims. After giving the reader a brief background of SMS, she gets back to the relationship between texting and oral communication writing: “text messaging utilizes components of oral thought, or patterns of thinking related to orality, rather than conversation per se”. To close, Zurhellen considers the intimacy of texting compared to online chat and how learning to text is more intuitive than analytical.

Turner, Kristen Hawley. “Flipping the Switch: Code-Switching from Text Speak to Standard English.” The English Journal , Vol. 98, No. 5 (May, 2009) , pp. 60-65.

Live Football Game

If I were to write a post which would try to appeal to an audience that was watching a live football game, the first thing I would want to do is keep the post as short as possible. People who are watching a football game are not likely to want to gave their attention away from the game for too long unless it is a blowout. My post(s) would be polls which related to the game or interesting stats which pertained to the game at hand. Locker room interviews, pictures from during the game, and a poll on which player was the most valuable player of the game are all topics I would post about to get there attention.

Visitors of a Major Art Museum: 

Pictures, drawings, and other types of art would all be prominent in my posts. I would post art works or styles everyday along with a couple sentences or a paragraph explaining the historical context of the work of art. I might also post a guide to the museum itself; something that described its history as well as served as a guide.

Cinema Attendees for a Hollywood Movie:

My blog post(s) would be dedicated to trailers, Hollywood movie rumors, and other ‘inside scoops’ on what is happening in the movie world. If I could somehow know which movie the audience I was appealing to was seeing (say by their Google search history), I could more specifically target my posts to appeal to them.

Facebook (Social Media) Friends:

I would write a blog entry about something that had happened in my life. Since 99% of my Facebook friends have some personal connection to me, they are likely to click on a blog post if it is about something interesting that happened in my life. The event could be anything really (as long as it was remotely interesting) but the blog would be written from my personal point of view.

Readers of Academic Articles:

Many people believe that texting is negatively effecting our language. John Humphrey argues it is destroying our great language with the ferocity of Genghis Khan and John Sutherland of University College London says it covers up people’s grammatical mistakes, however, the fear which they are expressing is nothing new. The introduction of any new technology has historically caused much fear and excitement, though texting is stirring up more emotions then any before. This is partially because of just how quickly it has become present in out lives. While the idea of texting first began to be discussed in the mid 80’s, it would take five years after it was finally introduced in 1990 to be implemented. It didn’t really catch on at first, mainly because companies still had to figure out how to charge for it, but by 2005 there were over a trillion texts sent globally.

Despite the general fear of texting displayed by Sutherland and Humphrys, many now hold that the distinct orthography used by texters will not have a noticeable effect on our language as a whole. This is because that while many texters freely break grammatical rules, there’s still a large amount that adhere to the writing conventions (such as institutions) as it leaves less chance for the text to be misinterpreted. In fact, data collected showed that less than 20% of all texts contain abbreviated forms of any kind, going against the media’s labeling of texting as ‘novel’. 

People are scared of what regular use of texting orthography will do to our writing style. Stories of texting destroying students’ ability to write, such as the one of the girl who handed in an essay so full of text lingo that it was illegible, are likely just urban legends born out of this fear. The ‘distinctive’ features of text orthography surprisingly predate the form of communication, finding their roots in the early chatrooms of the web. Even more surprisingly is the fact that rebuses, single letters, numerals, and symbols that represent a word or phrase, actually go back many years. People have been initializing the words they use for many years, such as IOU which originated all the way back in 1618. There was even a Dictionary of Abbreviations published in 1942 by Eric Partridge which contained many examples that looked as if they were taken from actual SMS messages. So while many people believe the abbreviations we see in texting are a completely new idea, the English language has always had abbreviated words whether everyone liked them or not.

By building on the many processes for shortening words used in the past, text messages can become almost puzzle-like, though few rarely do. Because of how un-standardized text messaging lingo is, each person has their own unique style, a digital fingerprint of sorts. Though the use of abbreviations was at first simply an innovative solution to the technological limitations of early cellphones, saving space and time isn’t the only reason why people text how they do anymore, people also love playing with the language. 

Being fun and playful is one of the main characteristics of texting so to celebrate this, T-Mobile had the world’s first ever SMS poetry contest in the UK in 2007. While many dismiss the art as pointless due to its somewhat arbitrary 160 character limit, it is just as valid as haikus (with their 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable format) except haikus have been around much longer. Because of how little space the author has to work with, each short line holds so much power. Those who weren’t happy with the short length but still wanted to stick with the medium began writing SMS novels where each text would be a chapter in a story. This art form has definitely taken off more in Asia then elsewhere, as in China they have created a mobile literature channel. Yoshi, a famous Japanese writer of this style, even allowed users to text back what they thought should happen next, taking advantage of the medium’s interactive nature.