Texting Is Literacy: Twob Or Not 2B By David Crystal
583 Words3 Pages
Lily Ho
Instructor Rash
English 1013 - 003
5 September 2014
Texting is Literacy
In David Crystal’s article “2B or Not 2B”, Crystal discoursed about the topic of text messaging and how it is not destroying language. Crystal first discusses that people are not using as many abbreviations in text messaging as some who believe that texting is ruining language. Second, he goes on to establish that abbreviation is not new and that it is logical to use it to where some become new words in the dictionary. He lastly states that texting allows people to be creative with language and that it does not have an effect on literacy.
One would asked themselves is texting really ruining language? Certain people like John Humphrey have the common belief that texting is ruining language and making younger generations ignorant of how to write proper English (335) . The history of texting begun in the 1990s, where one could only send text twenty characters in length, But it has grown since then (336). It is known through research that people do not use as many…show more content… It is known that people have been using symbols and condensing phrases far before the age of texting, so it is wrong for some adults to criticizes childrens for abbreviating words when they had once did it themselves(338). Crystal clarifies this by giving the fact that “Eric Partridge published his Dictionary of Abbreviations in 1942,” which had various examples of shorten phrases before text messaging was invented(339). He then states that "words such as exam, vet, fridge, cox and bus that are so familiar have effectively become new words."(339) So it is logical to believe that “abbreviations were used as a natural, intuitive response to technological problem”(341). Abbreviation is an essential resource for many texters and writers because they are just using what they have confronted in similar