Study of Brit students finds TXTING doesn't ruin your writing

Avid texters and their parents and teachers can relax after a study found that the use of wacky text-speak syntax doesn't appear to spill over into writing performed at school or work. The study, Exploring the longitudinal relationships between the use of grammar in text messaging and performance on grammatical tasks, rounded …

[Anonymous Coward]

TXTing doesn't wreck spelling

Who'd of thought it?

[WraithCadmus]

Re: TXTing doesn't wreck spelling

Who'd of thought it?

HNNNNNG! I wish I could both upvote you and downvote you.

[monkeyfish]

Human Brain in ability to separate formal and informal communications shocker!

(body)

[hplasm]

Re: Human Brain in ability to separate formal and informal communications shocker!

As any fule kno...

[h3]

I still don't understand why they do it. (With predictive text it is more effort than writing properly). Is it so they spend 1p instead of 2p ?

[Semtex451]

ur moma

[VinceH]

I can understand the need to use text speak in some contexts - such as, funnily enough, text messages - even if people aren't actually paying for the individual text messages, so it doesn't matter if it's kept short enough for one message or allowed to spill over into more. They're using a phone, and it's not the best user interface for typing messages. So fair enough.

What bugs the hell out of me, though, is when people use text speak in other contexts - and I do see it in other forms of communication, such as emails typed on a 'proper' computer with a proper keyboard. And, yes, in some cases these are formal communications, which is at odds with what the article seems to be suggesting.

[Martin Budden]

(With predictive text it is more effort than writing properly)

Apps like Swype make writing properly even easier still. You are right, txt spllng takes much more effort. Which means they are doing it on purpose, maybe to be cool.

[Pascal Monett]

The evidence suggests

“the evidence suggests that grammatical violations in the text messages of children, adolescents, and adults do not reflect a decline in grammatical knowledge.”

Of course not. The decline in grammatical knowledge was happening long before TXTing was a thing they could do.

[kestrus]

Re: The evidence suggests

It's all been going downhill since the invention of the telgraph IMO - which incidentally is where most of this 'modern' textspeak originated.

[Piro]

Never have used "text speak" in messages to others. It honestly just makes you look like an idiot.

Also, what's the point? We have predictive text for a reason. Often it can be faster to type a few characters than select the entire word than deliberately butcher a word.

Going past a one SMS limit is a load of old tosh. Most people have plentiful or free text messages these days (which I rarely use - e-mails for me). That said, if you're trying to post a message on Twitter, nobody can help you.

[Piro]

*then select.

Also, a vote down? Is Kevin an El Reg poster?

[Peter2]

I don't know what they studied to come to this conclusion, but if they advertise any vacency then i'm sure they will receive plenty of contrary evidence.

I mean, have they ever seen the standard of English in a stack of a hundred CV's?

[Alister]

but if they advertise any vacency

Oh the humanity, oh the irony...

[HipposRule]

Also "I'm" and "CVs"

[Phil O'Sophical]

txting hasn't hurt my writing

But 30-odd years of primarily using a keyboard has played merry hell with my handwriting. I can hardly read what I've written myself, these days.

[Graham Marsden]

Texting might not ruin writing...

... but typing seems to have had that effect on mine!

I learned to touch-type many years ago and now very rarely handwrite anything more than the occasional note. So when I've tried to write anything longer, I find I have to slow down or even do some "warm-up" writing on some scrap paper to make sure the result is legible...

[Mark 85]

I tend to disagree with the study

Purely anecdotal but too many of the younger IT types and user types do not seem to recognize the difference and when it's appropriate. Emails and chat messages in a chat forum (work related) all say otherwise. Even then there's the yahoos who think using l33t in their text and emails makes them smarter. What it does is causes confusion instead of the supposed clarity they should be using. Sorry. </rant>

[John H Woods]

My teenagers ...

... all use full english, and so do their friends. In my experience it is those in their 40s, who were in their 20s when txt spk was necessary, who still use this antiquated form of message compression.

[nick 77]

I've only met one person that had a txting disability

~5 years ago I was on Tier 2 computer support at a large international business machine corporation. After a new wave of hires only one person wrote tickets in txt. After speaking with him many times he tried to write normally. Apparently he never learned how to spell anything correctly in the wonderful U.S. public education system so he resorted to txting. He didn't last long.