OMG, CN U BLIV? LOL…

Texting and Tweeting: could the combination of these be affecting your children’s grammar? And no not only your children but also you, and adult that is reading this. Could you be guilty?

Research in Canada has shown that little or no grammar teaching, cell phone texting; social networking sites are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who cannot write. Now this is not only in Canada. I know for a fact that even my country is affected. I sent out a call for CV’s for interested persons a few days ago. I gave the interested persons my email address. Days later I was reading: “Attached is ma CV” .  Well, it could have gotten worse. But the truth is there are lots of spelling errors in our written grammar these days. 

Punctuation is another area where mistakes are so visible. There are people that have no idea that capital letters start sentences and  that full stops and commas exist. In one of my emails I got this:

 Morning Ruth

attached is my cv

best regards

The use of emoticons and such abbreviations are okay when writing to friends, but a clear line has got to be drawn when it comes to writing proposals, emails to colleagues et al. And more than wanting to write quickly: we must be careful to note that it is important that the other party clearly understands what we mean.

Interesting to note though is a story that the Daily Mail run last year in February.   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1353658/Children-regularly-text-message-BETTER-English-dont-thy-use-txt-spk.html  According to it Children that are fluent in text messaging have better literacy skills than those that do not have any exposure to mobile phones. These findings are based on a 10 year research.  The study also showed that children were subconsciously practicing their spelling by regularly sending text messages. Now that is a very big surprise by all standards.

However after all has been said and done:  This is for the young children that are still being groomed or rather that are still growing up. How about the majority of the adults who were before text messaging came and twitter was available; What is our excuse for writing wrong grammar?

A lot of effort has got to be put into communication. Sometime it is very hard to fit all your emotions and the words that come with them into 140 characters and thus a need to use short hand. However when this rubs onto the official and right communication: then there is a problem. You create a rather unserious image for others. You sell yourself short and that may work against you in the near future. It is not about saving time as we sometimes think, it has more to do with the writing ethic.  Practice your writing and let it be really good.

Oh yeah, and stop blaming auto correct. Learn your vowels. 

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