Blog post #1

The Trendspotter’s Guide to New Communication suggests a multitude of predictions that technology will provide in the future. Many of these predictions have a lot of truth to them however, there is one particular prediction that I find entirely inaccurate. Verbatim from the book, this prediction reads:
Improved Writing and Reading Skills. Electronic mail will induce young people to express themselves effectively in writing and to admire clear and lively written prose. Dull or muddled communicators will fall by the information wayside (Cairncross. The Trendspotter’s Guide to New Communications).

In today’s world, it is a known fact that the above statement is false. Technology has only weakened writing and reading skills for young people. This is due to text messaging and instant messaging.
http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm
The above link provides hundreds of text messaging and instant messaging shorthand’s. After going through a lot of these, I personally have not heard of the majority of them, but the fact is that they are out there and that many people do use them.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E5D71230F93AA2575AC0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
Above is a link to a news story written by Jennifer Lee and the title of it is I Think, Therefore IM. This article provides a handful of real life examples of students not properly writing. The article mentions an eight-grade teacher, Ms. Harding who is now incorporating shorthand instant messaging verbiage into her lesson plan.
Ms Harding says that students should know the difference between conversational writing and formal writing and I completely agree. It is one thing to use shortcuts with the language while text messaging or instant messaging but it is another to follow it through in your formal writing. Formal writing is a work of art and it should not be destroyed with abbreviations, misspellings and improper use of grammar.
Grammar brings about a completely new argument. It is not only the fact that students use abbreviations but they also do not know the proper rules of grammar. The majority of the time a text message is just one long run-on sentence and you will never see a period or common in instant messaging. Students do not know how to use a comma correctly because they do not use them in their day-to-day activities such as text messaging and instant messaging.
Misspelling words is another big issue. We rely so much on spell check that we do not even bother to learn how to spell anymore. Ms. Harding brings up an interesting point about how students will spell the word was like wuz. She said that she does not understand it because in this case it is the same amount of letters as the proper word. Students will start to write how they pronounce and annunciate the language. In some cases, I have received dat instead of that.
As mentioned in the above article, some teachers think this type of language is something that we may all have to get used to because it is just part of the new language evolution. I personally hope that this goes away quickly so that students can actually write properly.