In Defence of Text Speak

In a recent article at WebUpon, Penny Potter proposed that modern systems of instant communication have, effectively, destroyed the written word; reducing it to little more than a shell of language in which spelling, grammar and punctuation of all kinds are insignificant.  This position is somewhat of an overexageration.

Putting aside Ms Potter’s own grammatical errors and her misuse of the apostrophe when pluralising words (surely as big a crime in modern language as the ‘text speak’ against which she rails so eagerly?) we can get to grips with the problem as she sees it.  The crux of the matter appears to be Ms Potter’s very apparent distaste for the subversion of traditional grammar in modern communication, but this really misses the point.  She goes on to suggest that “punkgramma” (I word I believe she may have coined but which contains the very essence of the beast against whom she battles) is a response to always needing to be ready to make a sale, to be living in a fast-paced world where even taking a few seconds to spell correctly, or to place some much-needed punctuation in the hope of making one’s writing more legible, could mean the difference between eating and starving.  This seems a rather extreme position.

“Text speak”, to use the British term for contracted English sans punctuation, came about following the mass uptake of mobile telephones, and with them the ability to send a ‘text message’.  While modern mobile telephones allow the sender to splice together multiple ‘texts’ to create one long message, the early devices could not do this.  The user’s messages therefore had to fit into 160 characters; the small amount of space provided for by the text messaging system.  Characters does not mean letters, however.  It also has to include spaces and punctuation.  That does not leave much room for a message, so something had to go.

Humans are nothing if not ingenious.  When faced with the problem of having a lot to say and a small space in which to say it, the human mind came up with an excellent solution: compress the message by removing anything which will not lose the essence of the message through its absence.  Thus many vowels are dropped, punctuation is waved a fond farewell and where a number can replace a few letters – because when read out, the number sounds similar to how the letters would be pronounced – we find numerical additions to our alphabet.  It is the literary equivalent of a zip file.  The brain decompresses the message, turning what may at first look like gibberish into a coherent message.

Once something is invented, it cannot be un-invented.  The text message has brought us a form of writing that is fast, efficient and easily understood.  It takes very little time to type and so it reduces the amount of time, and space, a message takes up.  On the Internet, where communication can be instant, it allows people who are not the fastest typers in the world to communicate with one-another at close to the speed they would converse face-to-face.  Is it any wonder this written word dialect is so common on social networking sites?  Of course not.

Anywhere else it would look out of place, but it does not appear everywhere else; and when it does rear its head in comments on blogs, or on YouTube it is often met with derision and scorn.  It excels at speed and in places where messages are limited by character count, but where these are not an issue peer pressure makes its use unwelcome.

In short, Ms Potter’s assertion that text speak will sound the death knell to modern written English is  a vast exaggeration born of a misunderstanding of the purpose of this new form of writing.  It is a tool, nothing more, and like all tools it has its place.