Is Texting Ruining Our Children’s Writing?

by David Safier

Some people are worried that our children who are texting, Facebooking, emailing and IM-ing will never learn how to write in complete sentences using capital letters and punctuation. Worse, they’ll only be able to write in the abbreviated, telegraphic style of these dashed-off, emoticon-laden messages and lose the ability to write long, thoughtful essays.

They fear that English-teacher English will die the death of a thousand thumbs.

I disagree. People are smart enough to know how to speak multiple versions of English, and they’re smart enough to learn how to write multiple forms as well. Most of us can slide back and forth from casual-profane-and-slangy English to formal English, even though they use different words, phrasings and sentence structures. We even change our intonations to fit the audience we’re talking to. Students with their still-malleable brains can certainly learn when it’s time to capitalize the first letter in a sentence and write out “for” instead of using “4.”

I’ll even go so far as to say that the resurgence of writing as a means of personal communication can have positive effects on writing. As a teacher, I always stressed that writing is first and foremost a means of communication, and niceties like spelling and punctuation are ways to make it easier for others to understand what we have to say (I’m overstating the idea here, but I stand by the concept, which shocks some of the more hidebound English teachers). But when students only write for school, the essential communication feature of writing is too often lost. Imagine if the only time we spoke was in school, with a teacher correcting us every time we said something “wrong.” Most of us would end up speaking like tongue-tied idiots.

I used all kinds of methods in my classroom to encourage students to write from the inside, to communicate their genuine thoughts and feelings on paper, as a way to make their writing more fluid and genuine. I found they liked writing more as a result, and their essays tended to be better written. Rather than writing in a cramped version of “English teacher English,” they wrote in a more personal style, which I could then help them clean up and formalize.

The tech revolution has vastly increased the number of people who use writing as a form of personal communication. Email, texting and Facebook messaging are considered as vital by today’s youth as talking on the phone. (I saw a comic strip recently where two young girls were sitting next to each other on a couch texting each other because it was better than talking. An exaggeration, certainly, but a genuine insight into the changing nature of communication.)

So my sense is, if students learn to write what they’re thinking and feeling, they internalize the idea that the purpose of writing is communication, not just something you have to do for school. That can lead to writing, even formal writing, that is more meaningful, better written and possibly better organized.

Or, to put it another way: If I’m coaching a kid’s basketball team, I’d rather have someone who’s spent hours on the basketball court shooting, dribbling and playing pickup basketball — even if s/he has a dozen bad habits and fouls constantly — than a kid who spent time at a basketball camp learning how to play “correctly” but has never just picked up a ball and played the game for the sheer, glorious hell of it. The first kid has probably developed a court sense and fluidity that can only come from spending hours on the court discovering your own style by playing the game because you want to. I can always teach him/her how to get rid of those bad habits. The second kid, though, will probably play a stiff, by-the-books game that will be uninspired and easily taken apart by the first kid who understands the game from the inside.