Does Texting Affect Literacy?

How many texts do you send in a day? Even though I’m not a huge phone-user, I still feel like I send A LOT of texts. I’ve always wondered if your literacy could be affected by something as simple as texting. Think about it. Haven’t you ever just spelled something the “texting” way or felt the urge to spell ‘I don’t know’ as ‘idk’? Idk- I mean, I don’t know (Sorry that was cringe) about you, but I DEFINITELY have. Here’s some research I found on the internet about this.

First of all, did you know the average teen sends about 50 texts a day!!?? That’s crazy.

“Text Messaging is just the most recent focus of people anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language”

– David Crystal

Imagine if those texts were the cause of future generations literacy skills! I can totally imagine 50 years into the future, seeing people speak in complete abbreviations! I’m not the only one, because people researching this have even come up with a word for the language. Textese.

People are complaining about a lot of things, but one of the most common complaints and source of memes is autocorrect. You hate it, but you can’t live without it. When you start typing something out, autocorrect finishes it FOR you. Where’s the effort? I’m not complaining, because I’m not a huge fan of spelling things out either, but the fact that I don’t even have to try? If I type in something like: ltrecy, autocorrect knows to correct it to: literacy. Writing things out is going away too. You’re reading a blog post right now. You’re on an electric device, maybe typed something up to get here, and are reading this. I’m TYPING this out right now! Again, I’m not complaining, just stating facts.

So to the point, does texting affect literacy? Yes, it most definitely does. We’ve reached the point where people are searching things up like “corn teen”, in hopes of finding searches for “Quarantine”. Literacy is the face of people, it’s how we express our thoughts and opinions, so it’s really important that future generations understand the depth of the situation.

“A good head and good heart are always formidable combination but when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special”

– Nelson Mandela

But I guess, whom kares?