Teen Texting Affecting School English Grades?

If you’re a parent, you know your teen wants texting, or already has it.  If you’re a teen, like me, you know that you absolutely love texting, right?  It’s a great way to connect with people and stay in touch with the people you care truly about.  If you have don’t have a full keyboard cell phone then you know how much longer it takes to write down what you want to say.  Your solution?  You use acronyms such as “brb”, “l8r”, and “gtg”.  You find this writing strategy to be useful and start to use it online on Facebook and Twitter and for everything you do online on your computer.  But then when you go to write a school English paper, do you stop to think about what you’re writing?  To make sure that you’ve written correctly using the right words?  It’s a paper that you have to turn in for a grade and assuming you want a good grade, don’t you want your paper to look professional?  I bet you’ve caught yourself or a friend of yours saying “tht” or “wht” in your paper and turning it in to get a bad grade on it. And then you wonder why you did that.

Texting is affecting kids all over because of how you’re practically forced to write in incorrect English.  Not just texting but just everywhere you write in an incorrect English such as l33t speak.  Yes it’s fun to talk to your friends in l33t speak but when it starts showing up on your papers, that’s when you should know that the limit has been reached.  You start to get marked off grades and lose points and for no good reason!  Not saying to quit talking to your friends but simply more to talk correctly, using correct English to the best of your abilities.  Or else overall, your skills in the English language will drop and it will make it difficult for teens to be able to achieve better jobs.

Jobs are attained usually through sending in resumes to employers.  Resumes are expected to be written in a clear and professional way, not choppy and uneducated-looking.  So when you speak in such a disdainful way, it makes it harder for you to attain jobs.  The invention of texting to be used on Cell phones has worsened the writing skills of teens and obtaining jobs is already difficult given the current status of our economy.

Not being able to write clear and professionally becomes a direct factor to the future of kids today and in coming ages.  Sure, have fun and goof off but also keep a close eye on your professionalism because both the future of teens today and the futures of coming generations depends on it.

Even simply writing this article made it necessary to be able to recognize such faults in ourselves.