Texting Ruins Literacy Skills

For years, there have been many debates on whether texting ruins the literacy skills of a person. Some say that the use of ‘text talk’ (or the use of abbreviations) is the primary cause. On the other hand, there are others who disagree and say the use of ‘text talk’ improves such skills in our youth. “Texting is thought to have either negative or positive effects on students’ literacy skills. When asked their opinion, educators said that the believed that texting has had a negative effect on students’ writing skills” (Verheijen). Most of the time, the people who believe that texting is bad are those who grew up before cell phones became as big of a deal as it is today. Texting will always have an impact in the education department and in the

It was also shown that high texters scored lower on verbal and non-verbal reasoning than non-texters and low texters (Plester, Wood and Bell). Results from studies suggested an overall negative effect on texting on literacy test results. It has been advised that students are not distinguishing between informal and formal contexts, and are using textees at the wrong times. The general message that the media sends about the effects of texting tend to be rather negative overall. Thurlow is quoted saying that texting “signals the slow death of language” and is “a threat to social progress” (Verheijen). It was discovered during a study that participants took longer and made more errors when they had to read textees messages as opposed to reading Standard English (Kemp and

One study shows that the more abbreviated words that the students used, the higher their verbal reasoning scores were, which clearly points to a positive association between textism used and verbal reasoning (Plester, Wood and Bell). Another study was led using British children which suggests that more proficient literacy skills were associated to decoding textisms, which supports the idea that using textisms are heavy development of literacy skills. A textism or textees is “an abbreviation used in text messaging; a form of written language as used in text messages and other digital communications, characterized by many abbreviations and typically not following standard grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style” (Kemp and Bushnell).Textisms are often associated with acronyms, emoticons, and the removal of excess parts of spelling and grammar (Doruin and