???It's inevitable.
English, along with every other language, continuously goes through rapid changes in style, especially with the introduction of new mediums of communication. When e-mail exploded as a legitimate way to converse among peers, capitalization and standard punctuation were sacrificed. The same thing-to a further extreme-is occurring today regarding the explosion of text messaging in recent years.
???English teachers across all academic levels fear that this modification of language is destructive to the ability for children to learn written Standard English-a claim that is unfounded. The argument arises when teachers and professors find abbreviations and slang in papers to be graded.
???Is this really a problem of text messaging?
???The real problem is the view of English as one single form, instead of viewing language as a massive collection of differing dialects and styles. Many critics of these new forms seem to believe that the written Standard English is the only style that holds value. While that may be true in theses and research papers, it simply is not in many other cases. It is valuable to know and use slang when engaging in informal social situations, or else you will appear to be cold and pretentious.
It is foolish to believe that learning how to communicate in "text-speak" will influence, or even destroy, one's ability to communicate in the standard. No one claims that learning Chinese inhibits the ability to continue to learn English, so how can critics of new styles have anything to fear?
???The fact is that there are many diverse styles of English that are applied to various social situations. How you write your senior thesis will be completely different from how you write a text message, it's merely a matter of applying those registers of speech to their proper places.
???Nobody whispers across a loud room to get somebody's attention or yells in the ear of their friend in class, so it is obviously ignorant to apply text-messaging abbreviations to other mediums.
???If students are turning in papers with "4eva" and "ttyl" in them, then it is the educators' responsibility to clarify what is expected, not to abandon a critical style communication.
???The English we speak today is collectively so much different then the English of 50 years ago, and even more so 100 years ago, and we still communicate just as efficiently, if not better.
???So don't speak Chinese to somebody who doesn't know it, and don't write "LOL" in your biology research paper. Oh yeah, you already knew that.
