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Christopher Holland

ENC110104

Professor McGriff

8/23/18

Argumentative Essay

How many times have you sent a text to someone and condensed the message by

abbreviating words involuntarily or leaving out certain punctuation? A majority of us do but a

handful of people believe that communicating this way is bad for the English language, has

decreased our vocabulary, and decreased interactions. However, I taking my own thoughts and

opinions into this, I believe that communicating this way is actually beneficial for society

because it has actually increased the English language, expands our vocabulary, and increases

interaction amongst others.

The first argument is that texting can help or hurt the English language. In Everyone’s an

Author, Crystal references one of John Sutherland’s papers that texting is “bleak, bald, sad

shorthand. Drab shrinktalk. . .Linguistically it’s all pig’s ear. . . it masks dyslexia, pool spelling,

and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates” (Crystal, 899). Although I agree with

Sutherland to an extent, I still believe that it’s not completely true. Even though Sutherland

believes this evidence can rebuttal the statement. According to Crystal “Research has made it

clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the danger) of text messaging was

misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed

abbreviated forms of any kind-about 3 per message” (Crystal, 901).

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The next topic to bring up about texting and how it can expand or corrupt our vocabulary.

Since vocabulary is the basics for literacy and the comprehension of, a number of people can

make the assumption that people abbreviate due to not being able to spell efficiently. That is not

the case however; according to Crystal, “children could not be good at texting if they had not

already developed considerable literacy awareness” (Crystal, 906). To build upon the idea that

teens aren’t losing their vocabulary, Author of Times Magazine article, John McWhorter implies

that “All indicators are that America’s youth are doing quite well. Texting, far from being a

scourge, is a work in progress” (McWhorter, 2013)

Building upon what Crystal and McWhorter say, children are thriving and that they wouldn’t

know how to text if they weren’t literate and had a vocabulary to communicate effectively with

others. With texting abbreviations being acknowledged by more and more of society, Oxford has

solidified words such as: cos “because, “wot “what,” and gissa “give us a.” These have been

brought to light due to the works of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH Lawrence,

and Alan Bleasdale.

The final topic to address is how texting and social media affects our interaction among

others. A number of people have begun to believe that social media doesn’t meet the requirement

of interaction we should get from it, especially Authors Graff and Birkenstein, implying that

“although the digital world may connect us far more rapidly and with far more people than ever,

it doesn’t always encourage a genuine meeting of minds”(Graff and Birkenstein, 167). Even after

the implications that it doesn’t necessarily provide the best interaction, overall, there is still

reasons why social media helps with interactions. According to Graff and Birkenstein, “Another

way that online forums enhance our ability to connect with others is by allowing readers to
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respond-not only to the original article or post but also to one another through what we might

call juxtaposition. An example of a social media that allows users to respond this way would be

twitter allowing you to comment on a tweet and have it embedded in yours, while allowing

others to comment on your tweet.

After going through and analyzing multiple articles covering the English language,

Vocabulary, and social interaction and both sides of texting and social media there is a lot of

information to absorb. However, I would have to say that there is more good than evil. I believe

this because in society today everything is changing all the time, including our language and how

we communicate with others. If I were to pick out something to be wary of though, it would be

how much we rely on social media and the internet in our daily lives. With that we should still

attempt to try and use more proper grammar and less abbreviations since you don’t know how

familiar someone else may be.

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Work Cited

Crystal, David. “2b or not 2b?”Everyone’s an Author with Readings, Edited by Marilyn Moller,

W.W.Norton and Company, 2016, pp.899-907.

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic

Writing. W.W.Norton and Company, 2016.

McWhorter,John. “Is Texting Killing The English Language?” Times,

ideas.time.com/2013/04/25/is-texting-killing-the-english-language/.April 25, 2013,

Accessed 20 October 2018.