Persuasive Essay On Texting And Driving

Since their introduction to the U.S. consumer market in the mid 1980s, cell phones have grown into the largest and fastest growing industry in the U.S., and even possibly in the entire world. Over the past thirty years cell phones have greatly increased in popularity and in availability. As of January 2017, 95% of Americans owned cell phones and 77% of Americans owned smartphones (Mobile Facts Sheet). The extensive usage of cell phones negatively affects our daily lives by impacting our day to day behaviors.
The percentage of Americans that own smartphones today is a huge difference from 2011 when only 35% of Americans owned smartphones (Mobile Facts Sheet). Phone usage has also increased over time. Phone users have been organized into three

Everyday people drive to work, school, the grocery store, the airport, and everywhere else. Cars take us where we needed to go quickly, much faster than we could walk or ride a bike somewhere. But cars are also dangerous. Car crashes are very dangerous, and can be deadly to the people inside the cars. They also destroy property, multiple cars, and even front lawns, or a stoplight, or stop sign, all of which are very expensive to fix. Cell phones is the largest distraction to drivers when they are on the road, therefore further increasing the danger of driving. Phones distract drivers in a few ways. The first means of distraction is through texting. When a driver is driving at 55 mph, a text could distract them for up to 100 yards (Distracted Driving). 100 yards is the length of a football field. Think about all of the cars a texting driver could come into contact with in a 100 yards. All of those cars have a possibility of being hit because one driver is texting. Second, drivers are distracted by cell phone calls. Simple conversations, for example, calls that don’t emotionally affect a driver, don’t affect a driver’s ability to remain focussed or control a car (Strayer). But more complex conversations affect a driver’s recognition memory and dual tasking abilities (Strayer). Impairing recognition memory means that it is harder for a driver to understand and recognize what is in front of them. This can be very

The college students were all from the same undergraduate program at the same university. They exposed 80% of the college students in the study to each of the four types of popular technology on available on a cell phone. 20% of the students used facebook, another 20% used texting, another 20% used emailing, and the last 20% exposed to cell phones used MSN messaging. This left 20% of the students had no cell phone at all. Then, all of the students took a 15 question multiple choice test. The students that did not have a cell phone, or any of the technology, with them while taking the test did better than the students that had a cell phone and the other technology (Lepp). Another statistic noticed is that students who don’t use their phones during a lecture write down 62% more notes than students who do use their phone during a lecture (Kuznekoff). Students that were not on their phones could also remember more information from the lecture (Kuznekoff). As you can see, phones very easily distract students and cause them to multitask. These behaviors are a bad pattern to get into because they have been studied and proven to lower student’s scores on multiple choice tests, and lowers their focus and ability to learn during a lecture in