psionandy

According to a report from the Eire Department of education, reported in today's Irish Times, there could be a link between the way students answer exam questions, and the popularity of text messaging.

Apart from the obvious problems with spelling and grammar, It was noticed that the standard of writing has decreased as students try and answer questions with as few characters as possible.

The examiner elaborated that kids were "choosing to answer sparingly, even minimally, rather than seeing questions as invitations to explore the territory they had studied and to express the breadth and depth of their learning and understanding".

The examiner concluded: "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. Expertise in text messaging and email in particular would appear to have affected spelling and punctuation."

Or to put another way

"d emergence of d mob fone & d rise of txt msgN az a populR mEnz of cmUnik8shn wud apEr 2 hav impacted on stdz of writiN az evidenced n d responses of candidates
Expertise n txt msgN & email n prticulr wud apEr 2 hav affected spLN & punctuation."

And you can't really argue with that




Source: The Register

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marisa4755

The same kind of rubbish was iterated when typewriters were invented. They would 'ruin good handwriting', when email was devised, it would 'ruined the art of letter writing', telephones were virtually an invention of the devil now texting is in for a pumelling!

Well, texting forces people to concentrate a great deal of information into 160 characters. This takes skill, and an inventive and agile mind. These are qualities that are prized in a great number of environments.

In my opinion, a lot of the people writing these vast, endless and incomprehensible reports could do with taking a leaf out of the texter's book. Maybe texting will lead to a generation which can get to the point and cut out a lot of the waffle which plagues government and business, and finally get things done rather than endlessly talking and writing reports.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

gasusan2006

It's a new world we live in.....

I knew I was in trouble when I recently saw/heard a tv ad for (I think) Verizon, in which a little girl talks to her Mom in "text language" (the commercial has subtitles)...... and I was able to understand the entire conversation without looking over to the tv to read the subtitles.....

Susan

whoster69

What utter nonsense. People, pay attention to the linguists. There has been some startling research on this in the last decade or so. Young people reinvent language. They always do and it's important that they do. I get so tired of the traditional snobs rallying against whatever it is that each generation of young people do to change language.

As a teacher, I'm just glad they are writing and thinking. The rest will follow. How about a little faith in the human race eh? ;)