American Teens Write Off the Written Word as a Cultural Antique
 

American Teens Write Off the Written Word as a Cultural Antique
By Ted Landphair



Last month, one of the most erudite of Americans, Librarian of Congress James Billington, fretted in a newspaper interview about the nation's information revolution. He said personal, back-and-forth electronic communication is fast degrading -- even destroying -- what he called the basic unit of human thought: the sentence.

He cited sloppy grammar and punctuation, careless spelling, and cutesy abbreviations that young people, especially, employ in online chatter, web-based journals called blogs, and quick text messages they send back and forth, often using only their thumbs, on handheld devices.

"Text messaging is destroying the written word," asserts Jacquie Ream, a former teacher and author of a new book on communication skills.

Noting this, and focusing on young people in particular, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducts national surveys on all sorts of Internet-related topics, surveyed 700 teenagers by phone, and talked with others at length in person, about their written communication.

What may surprise you is that most teens don't think of their techno-aided writing as real writing at all. They acknowledge that writing is a key skill for getting ahead in life, but that all this electronic give-and-take has no more lasting value than a telephone call.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed admit that the casual informality of their Internet chats has crept into their serious writing at school, with harmful effect on their grades.

In short, American teens admit to writing more, studying the craft of writing less, and thinking of what they're tapping out on their electronic gadgets as something completely different from writing. As for sentences, it's clear that in the teen world, that basic unit of human thought is little more than a relic of musty, fussy times gone by.

VOA News - American Teens Write Off the Written Word as a Cultural Antique

If you're illiterate enough to involve your chatting with actual school work, then you'd be failing anyway.
Typing and texting have helped me with my writing.
I think blaming " text talk" on the fact that kids are failing or using it as a excuse is very arrogant.
Those kids are just lazy and would be lazy with or without language of texting.

This sounds more like the ranting of a technophobe with a literary spin attached to it than a warning of a veil of idiocy descending onto North America.

But 2/3 of kids have had their grades hurt by chat talk? That's an epidemic.

Where's the study that that's based off of? What's the sample size? You can't just toss around 2/3 like that so easily without actually considering the data that's gone into composing it.

All that proves anyway is that 2/3 of "teens" are admitting to being lazy.

No. That's laziness.
Kids always take the easy way out.
They know how to separate texting and actual english.
They simply won't and fail.

the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which conducts national surveys on all sorts of Internet-related topics, surveyed 700 teenagers by phone, and talked with others at length in person, about their written communication

Pew is the standard that most news journalistic sources rely on. This is not a bullsh*t source.

In America I am sure it is safe to say that more than 2/3 of teens have Internet access. If the way they communicate (which I see here daily) is how they think normal and respected communication goes on daily then they are in for a big surprise.

They have started compulsory classes for the people who write their essays in TXTSPK and wonder why they failed, in my school. About time too. 11-12 year olds seem to be the culprits.

The fact that a person could think that writing an essay in "Text-Speak" is acceptable is what alarms me.