English Death Knell

With the advancement of technology in modern society, computer language and text messaging have intruded their way into the everyday life of adolescents, causing extremely negative impacts on the literacy skills of young people. The use of computer language and text messaging has developed so rapidly that they have become the “essential” forms of communication for many teenagers.  Text messaging and computer language are  known to be anecdotal, more relaxed, shorter, and quicker to be expressed. However, the colloquialisms of the context, the grammatical errors of the language, and the increased use of abbreviations such as “omg” and “lol”, and misspelled words are the most savage ways to the degradation of English literature. The texting generation has been referred to as the “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago…; pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences; and raping our vocabulary (Humphreys, 2007). The question whether teenagers should be allowed to incorporate textism into academic writing should not be of a question at all. It should be a direct statement that textism and computer language will only cause our literacy skills to deteriorate and that more people will become ignorant to the appropriateness of the language and lose their ability to construct proper English. Although some might argue that textism and computer language are inevitable to the natural evolution of the language, the fundamental structure of English should still be preserved and practiced in the “correct” way. By doing so, we can prevent the risk of losing the significance of education as well as the definition of education. Textism and the use of computer language have received strong, violent protests from parents and teachers because they believe that these forms are the modern scourge that would continue to assault the appropriate use of language. With the influence of electronic devices, students now learn and do their homework without a dictionary but with the use of improper capitalization and punctuation, shortened words, and perplexing characters on academic paper. When students use computer language or textism frequently, they will reach a saturation point where they no longer realize their mistakes and will eventually adopt these errors as standard English. The effect of textism and computer language have permeated through adolescents’ lives and caused serious impacts on formal writing to a point that they are considered to be the “evolution of modern English”. Nevertheless, these methods will only result in devastating consequence of our literacy skills, and to accept them as ways to compose academic writings is preposterous and calamitous. As part of the young generation in which the issue of textism and computer language is most closely related to, we should be concerned about the increased prevalence of the usage instead of embracing and allowing it to decline our ability to write properly.