When we had to come up with article pitches last week, my mind went completely blank. I totally panicked and literally just wrote “IDK, lol” on my brainstorm sheet. I was sitting in the library staring at it, and our librarian, Ms. Buffington, walked by. Instead of telling me to write a real sentence, she pointed at it and told me to write about exactly that. It got me thinking. Is the way we type on our phones actually destroying our ability to write in standard English, or is it just a different way of communicating?
You have probably heard older people complain that our generation cannot spell anymore. They see us typing things like “tbh,” “fr,” and “rn” and just assume we are forgetting how commas work. There is a huge fear that text slang is going to ruin our research papers and destroy the English language forever.
The line between texting and real life does get kind of blurry sometimes. When Ms. Buffington gave me the idea for this article, she actually told me a story about her own daughter to prove that the texting mindset really does bleed into how we talk. “She actually says the letters B-R-B out loud when she gets up from the dinner table,” Ms. Buffington told me.
But honestly, most of us know exactly what we are doing when it comes to schoolwork. It is a concept linguists call ”code-switching.” Like, you do not talk to the principal the same way you talk to your best friend, right? It is the same with typing. Texting is supposed to be fast and casual. It is way closer to talking out loud than it is to writing an essay.
Texting might actually make us better at communicating because it forces us to get to the point faster. Plus, we use emojis and punctuation to show tone in ways formal writing just can’t. A period at the end of a text usually means someone is mad, but you would never leave a period off an English paper. It is just two totally different languages.
So, the next time someone tells you that texting is rotting your brain, just tell them you’re bilingual. We are fluent in both standard English and the fast-paced language of the internet. And tbh, I think that’s a pretty good skill to have.
