Text Messaging Harms Written Language

DUBLIN, Ireland (Reuters) — The rising popularity of text messaging on mobile phones poses a threat to writing standards among Irish schoolchildren, an education commission says.The frequency of errors in grammar and punctuation has become a serious concern, the State Examination Commission said in a report after reviewing last year’s exam performance by 15-year-olds.

“The emergence of the mobile phone and the rise of text messaging as a popular means of communication would appear to have impacted on standards of writing as evidenced in the responses of candidates,” the report said, according to Wednesday’s Irish Times. “Text messaging, with its use of phonetic spelling and little or no punctuation, seems to pose a threat to traditional conventions in writing.”

The report laments that, in many cases, candidates seemed “unduly reliant on short sentences, simple tenses and a limited vocabulary”.

In 2003, Irish 15-year-olds were among the top 10 performers in an international league table of literacy standards compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

A few of my younger cousins have tried sending messages to my dad, a non-native English speaker, and there were several time that he has asked for help reading the message. It was not because of the language, but the way the sentences and abbreviations were used. Consonants were taken out and worse some words were even shortened to a single letter! It might be faster for the one twiddling thumbs, but a heck of a lot harder to interpret on the receiving end.

It totally defeats the purpose of having newer phones with bigger screens and cheaper messaging rates if messages are compressed into as few characters as possible. It makes me think that I’m missing some sort of decoder on my phone to decipher the encrypted messages. There were times I have had to call the other party just to ask what the message originally was.  In my experience, it is no wonder that fewer teens have a good command of the English language.