In Defence of Text Speak
by The modern literary dialect of “text speak” is under constant bombardment but this development of English is being battered because of a misunderstanding of its purpose. When we look at how and why it has arisen, we can see why it is a useful tool, not the harbinger of written English’s demise.
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Post CommentLydia
On December 1, 2008 at 10:15 am
A very good point! Txt spk (haha!) was not born of ignorance of spelling, punctuation or laziness, but the invetiveness of the mind and person to meet the need of compressing the message. It would become laziness if a child used it in an essay but then would one have a go at secretary or student for note-taking in short-hand? Text seak arrived as there was a eed for it, like there was a need for shorthand. When books are soley written in text speak I’ll come back to Ms Potter’s article, otherwise, I agree with this one!
Zoe Robinson
On December 2, 2008 at 5:34 am
To be honest Lydia, if I see a book written in Text Speak and it’s not just a compilation of text messages, or something to that effect, I’ll be right there with you.
Jaime
On December 2, 2008 at 4:43 pm
“loose its essence”?
Do you mean lose?
Zoe Robinson
On December 3, 2008 at 2:23 am
A mere slip of the keyboard, Jaime.
Caroline Mathieson
On March 26, 2009 at 3:29 am
The existence of Text Speak is dependent on the incredible degree of redundancy of the English language. The fact that you can reduce whole words down to a single character quite often demonstrates this.
In fact its been demonstrated that the letters in words do not even have to be in the right order for many of us to still be able to understand them.
I have often wondered if the same is true for other languages?
I assume that languages in other alphabets such as arabic or greek do not have this capability. I will as a greek colleague at work today if this is the case.
Zoe Robinson
On June 9, 2009 at 5:55 pm
It would be interesting to find out if other languages have the ’shrink-down’ capacity that English enjoys (or is beset by, depending on your point of view). I’ll have to do some investigation, too!