.

[Gambit]

[GRAMMAR NAZI STUFF]
Firstly, it causes illiteracy. I don't mean full illiterates, but people forget spelling stuff and grammar and whatnot(1). I KNOW that it's not a large group of people,(2) most of the people I see texting aren't capitalizing words or anything, but at least aren't using "u" and "thx" and stuff(3). And(4) I can't tell you how many people don't understand the differences between Its and It's, u and You(5), Their There They're(5), accept and except(6), (one guy even thought expect meant the same as except) and many other things.(7)

I know a lot of people ACTUALLY spell out words and stuff in a text, so this part isn't going to go any farther.
[/GRAMMAR NAZI STUFF]

Ironic section is ironic.

the answer key:

1. Lists should be comma seperated.
2. Should be a period, not a comma. Capitalize the m in most.
3. Lists should be comma seperated.
4. Don't start a sentance with "and".
5. Lists should be comma seperated.
6. Lists should be comma seperated.
7. That whole thing is a run-on.

My point is, everyone makes typos. Also I don't think it's fair to complain about texting. It saves time to text that way. Now I would complain if I got an email like:

Hey guys!!!!!!!!!! Heres one more quize/survay i want u guys to take before school is over for the year. Like i did before, i`ll put my answers, but u have to put ur own answers in when u get this. There will be tittle`s for the qustions u will answer. First tittle is ( TV ), then ( school ) ( hobbies ), and then ( fav food and drink ).

The same for letters, or forum posts. In fact, if I get enough of these, the offending students magically lose their webmail priveledges. Texting, however, is made for chatspeak.
I put on my best grammar for this post. :)

[ElvenKing]

@Gambit
Well, (2) could be a semi-colon or perhaps even a colon(if "most people" was considered a logical consequence of knowing that it was not a large group) I think(bit hard to say for sure; the exact meaning of the sentence is confused: I'm not sure exactly how it should go because that is important for the placement of colons and semi-colons.

[Hulavuta]

I feel like a fool now...XD. I know, I was going to put that up, that it probably had grammar errors, but was mostly understandable. I'm not good at punctuating in sentences with long lists. Or ones that are just long.

But my point still stands that they are STILL getting words mixed up. They can't spell anymore either. Texting may have the purpose of being chatspeak, but it till causes issues in real life, which is MORE IMPORTANT.

[ElvenKing]

I feel like a fool now...XD. I know, I was going to put that up, that it probably had grammar errors, but was mostly understandable. I'm not good at punctuating in sentences with long lists. Or ones that are just long.

But my point still stands that they are STILL getting words mixed up. They can't spell anymore either. Texting may have the purpose of being chatspeak, but it till causes issues in real life, which is MORE IMPORTANT.

Well, actually, before we can determine if chatspeak is causing people to be unable to spell, the nature of how people spelt before the widespread use of chatspeak must be determined.

[Gambit]

Texting may have the purpose of being chatspeak, but it till causes issues in real life, which is MORE IMPORTANT.

I don't understand the seperation here. Texting is a way of communicating quickly. It's not like... a video game.

It is perfectly real life for me to quickly tell a friend:
"Hey its derek. Bret cming alng 2nite? Bring contrllrs."

Or a stranger:
"I dont hav a fro. U hav the wrong #"

It's like shorthand.

[artisticdude]

I personally can't stand that "R u f33ling sik 2day?" language. It may be shorthand, but it takes me longer to figure out someone's 'shorthand' message than it would for them to type the message in understandable English. I tend to be a grammar nazi anyway, though.

[Gambit]

"R u f33ling sik 2day?"

Well that's not all shorthand. That contains someone trying to be 1337 and failing.

"R u feelin sik 2day?" Gets the message across when pronounced literally.
[imo]
If it's on a phone, it's understandable. It's hard to type on those things! But if you're at a computer with a full keyboard and you speak like that, then it's a problem.

[lmelior]

I'm a little out of the loop these days but ten years ago I had fellow high school students that would put "lol" or ":)" in their essays for English class. Actually, I think I remember seeing those things in one of my college English classes, too. It was instant messaging dumbing us down back then, not texting, but I would think the same thing applies. It's true that most people don't have a problem writing formally when the occasion warrants it, but arguably the number of exceptions is growing as texting becomes a primary form of communication.

But who knows, we could be in the middle of a paradigm shift where these things become commonplace. I resisted for a long time, but I've taken to using smilies to indicate a lighthearted tone. It's difficult enough to read tone in any text, let alone a forum post with so few words. Just look at that awesome artist who mistook kitty's critique for insult and left a few days later. Granted many people could use a thicker skin, but if he'd understood her meaning he'd still be around.

[Hulavuta]

I've actually seen people use chatspeak in real life. On the writing on desks in my History class, people write stuff in chatspeak.


Maybe something I forgot to mention is that sending a message like

"hey man, u need 2 com over 2 work" is perfectly acceptable, but I don't think it's acceptable to have an entire conversation that way, like many of the people I see.

[sLaughter]

I'm much less worried about leetspeak and textingspeak and more worried about the prevalence of words like "up."

It used to be that we had a handful of words like "raise," "increase," or "improve," that express a handful of different concepts.

Now people just substitute "up" for everything, as in "up the volume on the TV" or "up your game before challenging him." It's almost as if people have stopped being able to grasp that those concepts are different and, instead, they just file it under the vague category of "up."

[Hulavuta]

While I don't necessarily agree with the "up" thing, I do agree with the fact that the average person's vocabulary is not very large.

[Dixie]

If people have those problems with english, which is generally considered like an overall easy language to learn, imagine how it could be with french! (which is accordingly a harder language) (I'm a native french speaker, btw). Proof (somewhat): people on this forum, although not perfect, have a generally good english. On some other french game forums, to which the main body of contributors are college and university students (or grad), the language is generally quite bad, if not outright horrible, to the point of sometimes being nearly unreadable. And I'm being from Quebec, you could think our proximity with english canada and the US would hinder our french-learning efforts, but I often find that youths from France are much worse.

Of course, chat and texting probably have their part of the blame to take. I mean, if correct language skills are valued nowhere but in school, how are the youths supposed to have the motivation to actualy learn them correctly? Even more so if school as a whole seems devalued (arguable; maybe it is less so in other places).

But I came to realise something, which you guys may disagree with: maybe everybody just isn't made for instruction? I mean, in the past, and let's not think about the middle ages, but just like around 1900, a lot of people were actually illeterate. Sometimes they didn't have the opportunity to learn, sometimes they just didn't have the inclination, whatever. So I guess that if today most people can read and write, even badly, it's already a good start. And not everybody can be lawyers and doctors, either: even if everybody had the potential, it just wouldn't work out. Anyway, I don't mean to stop letting everybody go to school and discriminate, and I don't either mean to stop everybody's efforts toward bettering/helping others better their language skills...

---

Anyway, I personnally dislike the idea of cellphones, the electronic leash, and I dpersonnally don't own one. I don't even need one, heh. On a side note, I saw tonight on the news that some people were conducting a large study to finally prove wether or not cellphones were actually a cause for cancer... and it seems like it points toward cellphone users, on the contrary, having a lower tendancy for brain etc. cancers than non-cellphone users. I can't help but think it's a biased study or something put up by communication lobbyists... What do you guys think?

[Zarel]

I often say "lol" out loud (as one syllable, not as an initialism), usually to be funny. What do you feel about that?

[Hulavuta]

I don't care about that, I do that too. My issue here is if somebody says it in real life NOT to be funny, and actually says it, (usually the "el-oh-el" way of saying it) they look like a text junkie or something. Like if a joke is told, and they laugh and say lol, but NOT as a joke.

My issue is also people who forget how to spell and can't tell the difference between homonyms. Although I'm not fully sure this is because of texting, it probably has to do with text chat in general.

[Pentarctagon]

honestly i didn't definitively know the difference between it's and its until 8th grade, and it fortunate that i learned it then, because that was the last time any grammar was ever taught in a classroom. i got through the ACT by choosing the answers that 'sounded right', which actually worked out pretty good