Texting, the Internet, and English

Arit John’s article, “The Internet is Making Writing Worse” [http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/07/internet-making-writing-worse/67297/], is a rather interesting piece that serves to remind its readers of the “danger” that technology poses to the English language. According to the Pew Research survey that John cites in the article, informal writing is leaking its way into the formal essays of adolescents. However, the statement should be taken with a grain of salt as its basis of information is, unfortunately, unreliable. Putting the fact that the information comes from a survey and not a formal study behind us, we are still left with the fact that we have absolutely nothing to compare the results of the survey to. Does utilizing technology, the Internet, and “text speak” really impact a student's ability to construct a strong argument and to digest complicated text – or has this been a problem in the past, too? While I can personally appreciate someone who has a solid command of the English language, at times I wonder whether or not such a command has any value beyond the aesthetic?

From what I can see around me, people can communicate with each other using abbreviations and “text speak” just as effectively as those that prefer a more eloquent choice of words, albeit perhaps even more efficiently. Such an observation then leads me to think about the other side of the argument: text speak may be yet another step in the never-ending evolution of the English language. While such informal language may be against the academic community's presently accepted standards, it's important to remember that even standards change as time goes on.

All in all, the question comes down to this: should we be conservative, and safeguard the English language from any and all change - or should we embrace these changes as new additions to the language's lengthy history? The answer, I believe, lies somewhere in the center.

Looking back to the past (as recently as a few decades ago in the United States to as far back as ancient Rome), we see that there have always been two main subsets of any one language: the common jargon that the majority of the population used to communicate on a daily basis, and the formal tongue that ensured complete clarity and eloquence in official and academic documents. If we are to extrapolate based on the past, it is not unreasonable to note that perhaps text speak is nothing more than an element of the present “common jargon”. As such, I think Arit John's fears of how texting and modern technology are negatively affecting formal/classroom writing are rather unfounded – students are not poor writers because they send text messages to their friends with ridiculous abbreviations, but because they are students (who presumably have less experience in academic writing than their instructors)!