OMG

            The cutie in your history class just texted you from across the room and asked you on a date. You snatch up your cell phone and send an ecstatic text to your best friend, giving them all the details, in under two hundred characters. Think about all the time you spend texting compared to the time you spend in face-to-face conversations. According to research conducted by the Seattle Times, 75 billion texts were sent in America in 2009, compared to 28.8 billion sent in 2007. That’s a lot of conversation opportunities that were left unfulfilled, with the average number of calls made per month decreasing from around 400 to 200 in the three-year span. With texting being such a big part of today’s society, is our generation likely to develop lasting consequences such as bad grammar and a loss of social skills.

            Walking through the halls here at Lake Hamilton, I can’t for the life of me tell you the number of times I hear the letters “IDK” [I don’t know] or “LOL”[Laugh out loud]. Most phones have a limit on the number of characters sent per message. Therefore, society has developed acronyms for almost everything you can imagine in order to type and send texts more quickly. If you’re one of the people who send hundreds of text messages a night, it’s likely that those acronyms stick in your brain. One avid texter said, “I probably text hundreds of messages each night, so I often find myself saying and writing in ‘text form’.” This is where the saying, “old habits die hard,” holds true. A teacher here at Lake Hamilton, agreed that students spelling and essay techniques have changed over the past few years: “It seems that more students nowadays can not spell nor remember to capitalize. They sometimes even write an essay in text language!”

Besides forgetting the spelling of words, there comes another important issue: correct grammar. Commas, semicolons, conjunctions, and subject-verb agreement are not very common among the phone-savvy. With the bad grammar and spelling commonly used in texting, it seems logical that those habits carry out into your everyday life. “Most of the points taken off my essays I write in my English class are for silly mistakes such as forgetting to put a period or using double negatives. I get so used to writing like that in texts that I sometimes literally can’t remember the right way to write,” one person admitted.

            Alongside our proper English going down the drain, we also face the issue of social awkwardness.  I mean, think about it for a minute. Would you honestly say in person half of what you say through text? Whether it’s telling someone what you really think, confessing your love to that sweetie, or saying things you shouldn’t, you probably say things through texts that you’d never even dream of having the guts to say in person. Texting seems to give us a newfound confidence to say everything and anything. For some, talking in person has become a challenge because they are so used to “spilling my guts through a thirty-letter text,” as one person put it. Twenty years ago, people didn’t just pick up their cell phone to ask someone on a date. No, unlike today, you worked up the nerve to ask them without the three mile distance.

            Although it seems like texting can do a lot more harm than good in the long run, it does have its positives. Texting provides you with a quick way to reach somebody no matter what you’re doing, gives parents a little peace of mind as to better being in contact with their child, and allows you to be in a conversation with out the disruption of your voice to those around you. Over the years, phone companies have developed new plans and better phones that have made text messaging easier and cheaper, which is probably why it appeals to so many nowadays.

Whether it’s a date proposal, your life story, or a derogatory rant, you can almost bet that it’s sent through a text message. Texting has become such an important part of society today, especially among us teens, that the bad “habits” we use while texting seem to be carrying out into our everyday lives. Bad grammar, misspelled words, and not knowing how to hold a conversation are problems that are plaguing us today. Now by all means, I’m not saying we all need to throw our cell phones in the lake and start going to someone’s house just to ask what they’re doing on Friday night.  Just take in to consideration all the bad grammar and loss of social time you’re enduring next time you’re typing your day in under 200 characters on your nifty little cell phone.

By: Candace Boehm