Text-Messaging Research

Earlier, we were talking about worries that text messaging is destroying young people’s ability to write.

But Grant, I think a lot of people will be surprised by a growing body of research that suggests that, if anything, it’s enhancing people’s ability to write.

That’s right. There’s one study that I saw that talked about the texting abilities of 11 to 24-year-olds.

And what they found was a higher level of literacy among the students who texted the most.

That is amazing.

And earlier this year, Sally Tagliamonte and Derek Dennis of the University of Toronto released a study that is just another one in a long line of such studies that had a lot of really interesting things to say that somehow never really make it to the popular press when it comes to talking about texting.

For example, all these texting habits that people have, they’re not creating a new language that will replace English.

It’s really just English under a different disguise.

There’s nothing really remarkable.

They also found something that I thought was most interesting to me, and they made a point of talking about it, which is that when we text, we tend to mix our language registers.

Do you know what I mean by that?

Different levels of language, right?

Yeah.

So you might use the words shall and will, and then right after that say gonna instead of going to, all in the same, even the same sentence.

So what we find with texting, because it’s such an abbreviated form of language, is that we’re looking for the words that have high impact but don’t take a lot of struggle to write.

So shall is a really great, strong word that talks about the future and something that you’re going to do.

And then gonna is just a really tight way of saying going to.

So it’s all about expediency and maximum impact for your, you know, per keystroke.

Right. So it’s not so much about the English language contracting or becoming more impoverished.

If anything, it’s expanding, right? I mean, that’s sort of the point.

Yeah, but it’s expanding in the same way that offline English does, the English that’s in newspapers, the English that’s in books, or the English that you might speak on the telephone to your parents.

English is a body is moving in certain directions, and texting isn’t part of that movement.

It shows all the signs that all the kinds of English are undergoing.

Does that make sense?

Look at this a different way.

Texting and the abbreviations in texting is just a tiny, tiny, tiny little fragment of all the English there is.

Exactly.

And to make such a big to-do out of it really overstates its importance.

And then within texting, abbreviations and emoticons and all these other short forms of language account for only 3% of all of the words used in texting.

Yeah, that was shocking.

Shocking statistic.

It’s a tiny little low number out of a tiny little part of English.

And so to give it this big harumpho, it’s destroying English, really kind of overstates the case.

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