Slashdot Mirror
Study Sez Txt Msgs Make Kidz Gr8 Spellrz
Picknz writes "The Telegraph reports that researchers have found texting can improve literacy among pupils by giving them extra exposure to word composition outside the school day. According to the report, the association between spelling and text messaging may be explained by the 'highly phonetic nature' of the abbreviations used by children and the alphabetic awareness required for successfully decoding the words. 'It is also possible that textism use adds value because of the indirect way in which mobile phone use may be increasing children's exposure to print outside of school,' says the report. 'We are now starting to see consistent evidence that children's use of text message abbreviations has a positive impact on their spelling skills,' adds Professor Claire Wood. 'There is no evidence that children's language play when using mobile phones is damaging literacy development.'"
I work on several writing projects involving technology. A really fascinating study showed that when you ask most kids if they write for fun, most of them will say no. If you then ask them how many text / email / IM / blog / etc., nearly everyone will answer in the affirmative. Teens don't see these kinds of things as "writing". Once you sort of get through to them that it is, it's like a lightbulb turns on in their heads, and they suddenly start getting engaged in English.
In other words, while it's really easy to mock texting (tweets especially annoy me), I think that if modern teachers learn to take advantage of all the writing teens are actually doing, we could see a revolution in English skills.
Phonetics can also make horrible spellers. Our school had a phonetics program called ITA (a US variation on the UK ITA system)when I was in grade school. It made pretty good readers out of kids, but crappy spellers, because they got used to the conventions of the phonetics program, and not actual grammar / spelling rules. Years after getting out of the system, I still saw high school seniors in honors programs who couldn't spell worth a damn.
From TFA:
"may be"
"possible"
Interesting. It's also possible that injecting people with heroin helps them stay away from drugs. And may be beating children with baseball bats gives them a wonderful childhood. Who knows?
This is like saying Ebonics is a language.
So now, all our great works will be reduced to 140 characters with no caps, no punctuation, and hacked up spelling. ee cummings was way ahead of his time.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
And yet the rate of instances in which I want to punch these texting douchebags repeatedly in the face is trending upwards.
My spelling must be great, because I lived through the 8.3 DOS filename days.
I am not a crackpot.
They really ought to include a text expansion feature in all IM and SMS programs. Then when the kid types gr8, it will appear as great in the actual message and there will be visual reinforcement of the correct spelling. It will also serve to reduce annoyance to people who hate txt speak. If the 140 char limitation is important in the application, then the messages can be transmitted as-is in txt-speak and translated automatically on the other side. Think of it as a primitive form of message compression.
Type of thinking has put many smart people into avoiding academic methodology in their lives. As they are just a bunch of closed minded dipwads.
The first sentence above is flawed, and made me read it twice before I understood what you meant, because you left off "This" at the beginning of the sentence. That only took a fraction of a second, but it was still jarring. The awkward phrasing of the second sentence above, and the use of an ad hominem, non-descriptive slang pejorative gives the impression that either you are not well educated, or didn't care enough about what you were writing to use common grammar and descriptive words.
In this case, it's not hard to understand what you were trying to say, but I estimate 50% of communication I see online contains significant grammar and spelling mistakes, and around 10% is so poorly written that meaning is actually lost.
Because this is Slashdot, here's my car analogy; we need everyone to stop at stop signs, every time. Even though hardly any of the "rolling stops" will result in an accident, some will, and as more people ignore the law, their careless driving will cause more accidents.
It's also true that poor spelling and grammar make you seem dumber than you are, and yes, your views will not be taken as seriously. As long as the majority of educated people react this way, you will suffer mild discrimination for it. I think that's good.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
I think it depends on the language. E.g. in Denmark we have a common joke that "written Norwegian [that is, Bokmål] is just Danish with spelling errors" because Norwegian words generally are spelled more in line with the phonetics of the language than it's the case in Danish. Furthermore, the vowels and consonants are flattened in the language of my generation which makes the connection to the "official spelling" of words less obvious. I don't see how the phonetic spelling creativity of text messaging is going to help then.
I'll ignore the multiple spelling/grammar/punctuation flaws in your post for the sake of making my point.
You are Cwix, slashdot member #1671282. That is all I know about you, aside from what you write. Much of the internet is this way, though admittedly Facebook and texting imply some previous, and likely real-life relationship as well. Since the only further information others know about you is based on the content of your posts, the lack of proofreading and spellcheck running implies that accurately expressing yourself isn't valued. For the ladies, it's akin to wearing mismatched clothes or a wrinkled dress when going to a bar.
How you say what you say is just as important as the message you're trying to convey. This is why grammar nazis like myself make it a point to express ourselves accurately. Sometimes it's expressed condescendingly, and I think that THAT is a problem (since it obviously doesn't help much), but summarily knocking the desire to express one's self accurately is shortsighted.
Actually, you do. Because if you look illiterate in your posts, many people will assume you're illiterate. Or stupid.
Either of which means that they'll ignore anything you say as incoherent rambling.
Note, by the way, that you used "your" repeatedly in your post. In all the cases you used it, it should have been "you're"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
And again, at the danger of being redundant, I can't see why it ain't more popular with the French.
Maybe because it would have to be held at a university level, I dunno...
But on topic: There's a danger associated with changing the writing system. Germany had such a reform a few years ago. Now, you might know, German is written pretty close to its pronunciation. So we're not talking about a ground shaking, language uprooting change here. A few words were made simpler, a few ss - ß rules were revised to make them more logic and less arbitrary, the "Ph" in some foreign words were changed to F (so now you write "fotografieren" and "Fantasie" instead of "photgraphieren" und "Phantasie", thankfully they spared us "Füsik", it's still Physik. At least to my knowledge and it's gonna be a very cold day in hell before I write Füsik! Ok, I mean aside of this example ...).
So as you might see, minor changes. Even if you don't follow the change, you will still be able to read everything.
The outcry! Insane! Damaging our language! Dumbing down our language! Whole newspaper staff refused to follow the new language system and (some to this date) continue to write in the "old" system. Schools are in disarray, some German states followed the new system, some clinged to the old one, and of course kids now learn two different forms of writing which, while not mutually crippling, would lead to good students suddenly making a lot of grave spelling mistakes were they to move to another state and write their tests there.
Now imagine a much more invasive revision of the English language that you would have to coordinate not in a single country (ok, in the case of German it was three countries that were affected but afaik the Swiss said from the start that they don't give half a shit about it), but with four very important native speaking countries, quite a few former colonial countries where English is still a formal, official language and of course with pretty much every other country on this globe with English being the de facto lingua franca.
I don't think anyone really dares to touch that with a mile long pole.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Young people will always be be young people. And old people will always be old people. One set has learned the rules of society and knowns that they exist to make things go smooth and the other does not. Young people also live in a world centered on them. They go to a school system that is all about them, are raised by parents who care for them, watch TV that is aimed at them. Surely the world must be about them!
Well no. The full world, the world of adults is actually not about kids at all. Simple test, unless you are a parent or young, when are the school holidays in your region? Don't know? You did know when you were a kid. You will know when you are a parent. In fact in those circumstances the summer holiday is the center of your world. For the rest of adults? Sometime in the summer, maybe.
Kids when dealing with the non-kid world find themselves suddenly surrounded by adults that really just don't fucking want to deal with them. Random adult X is not your mommy. So on such forums, people are not willing to first put the child at ease, deal with their temper tantrums or fragile ego's. The kid is not used to have to deal with people not at its beg and call and voila, the age gap is there. But this one has "always" been there, or at least since the modern child hood was invented by the Victorians.
The generation gap is not just spelling. It is the simple attitude that has a teen first day on a temp job go to the sound system and put on his music... he just doesn't get that the pecking order changes from school to the workfloor. Oh some young kiddies will now protest, showing just how young and kidlike they are in the process.
The people posting on your forums just haven't learned yet that if you want to interact with other people it helps to follow the common unspoken rules. But this is their age and selfcenteredness, not their spelling skills at work. Plenty of older people who are self-centered start a forum post with "HELP please" in the subject, forcing anyone to open the post to see what the actual problem is... bad spelling? No, just not being able to do the mental work that other people have their own lives and so if you want their help you ought to make that as smooth a process as possible.
Just watch the number of people here who don't use the subject box to announce the content of their post making it more work to determine if its worth to open it if it hasn't been modded up yet.
As people grow up, and this is more then gaining years, they learn that other people have their own lives and that by communicating effectively, they can have favors done more easily because ultimately it is less work. Kids don't just have the social skills yet. That is why they are kids.
A simple example? I use paragraphs to make the text easier to read. Because I want YOU to read my posts, so I make it easy to do so. Read slashdot and see if you can find posts that are just one big block of text. Clearly such posters did NOT consider their audience capability to read the post comfortably. Not out of malice, just that knowing other people are human beings with their own feelings is not something that comes naturally to the young or self-centered.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If a generation Z kid tries to communicate with me in their language I simply won't understand them. I do understand that their language serves a purpose in terms of manual data compression. As another poster pointed out you could just have the phone translate it into English after it has been transmitted. Yet it does isolate them from the rest of the world who doesn't speak their language. I highly doubt it helps their English skills in any way because what they are practicing is not English.
I doubt that text messaging in txt language is in itself enough to make a good speller into a bad speller, but you are not going to find that out in a 10 week study. I think the argument is that children are getting too much of the wrong kind of language practice. They are getting a huge amount of practice in a language which does not exist outside of their group. It may be true that the txters who are poor spellers may have been poor spellers even without mommy's cell phone, and it's not like they would have had any writing practice outside of school anyway. But the txt spelling is constantly being reinforced. It would be very surprising indeed if this had no repercussions whatsoever outside of cell phone use.
I personally believe that spelling is not the problem. Nowadays nearly everything written is written on a computer and computers have spell checkers. It's like being able to do mathematics in your head versus needing a calculator. Technology has made English spelling into a skill that is borderline archaic. And the fact that English is so absurdly non-phonetic also cannot be ignored. Maybe the language should gradually be changed to be spelled more like Spanish for instance. That would be moving in the direction of logic and progress. Txt language moves in exactly the opposite direction toward greater complexity in spelling. It is even more difficult to learn. Aside from the unnecessarily complicated spelling, the English language is one of the easiest in the world to learn. I have little doubt that that is the most important reason that it has replaced French as the international language, even though French is a much more beautiful language.
I think the biggest problem with all the txting is that the 140 character limit in nearly all of their communication may encourage a short attention span when it comes to reading, listening, and maybe all forms of communication. Yes, it encourages brevity/conciseness as well, but at the expense of genuine literacy. It is simply not possible to communicate complex and subtle concepts in less than 140 characters. If you zone out any time a "wall of text" exceeds a few sentences you are going to have a lot of trouble understanding complex and subtle ideas. And if you limit your outgoing communications to no more than a few sentences at a time you are going to severely limit the complexity and subtlety of ideas that you can express. Eventually this laziness, lack of patience, and expectation that all information be received in easily digestible little pieces can become habitual and you won't realize that anything is wrong with the way you are processing information.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Not really.
People who do not communicate effectively are naturally less likely to be taken seriously in a written argument. Bad writing of any kind seriously distracts from the point you are trying to make, making your communication (and argument) weaker. I can usually get around it just fine, but there are still a number of cases where I can't stand to read someone's post simply because they couldn't bother to use any punctuation, or they decided that their entire post should be one big, run-on sentence.
Spelling mistakes I care less about, but fragments are especially bad. Native English speakers might realize that by "Type of thinking" the GP meant "This type of thinking", but what if a non-native reader came across that? They'd either scratch their head for a half hour trying to figure it out or just give up and ignore the argument. People who understand what you meant to say will almost certainly (and usually involuntarily) think less of your opinion for the simple fact that you sound like an idiot (note that this has absolutely no bearing on the actual argument).
Good writing is critical for effective communication. Frankly, in my opinion the GGP's point was severely damaged by the errors in his post. Had it been flawless, the point could only be argued on the merits. Instead the GP was able to come back with a "you're clearly just an idiot" attack, and you in turn had to defend him. This pulled me off the original post as well, simply to disagree with you.
Had the post been communicated effectively none of these distractions would have taken place, and we would simply be discussing whether or not the grammar nazi's add any value to the discussion.
You might think I disagree with the GGP, but I actually agree with him in principle. My point, however, is that arguments are not won with pure logic. If you are going to make an argument, it is best not to paint a giant bulls-eye on your back by committing serious and obvious grammatical mistakes.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller