War of Words

Writing Words in Full should be encouraged to maintain Expertise in Writing Language

Textism is the practice of using phonetic sounds to replace words when writing short text messages to be sent through mobile phones. Words such as “your” is replaced by the sound “ur” or “you are” is replaced by “u r”. Thus, textism does not adhere to the rules of writing language and when “u r” is used in writing in an English course it is considered as a grammatical error (van Dijk, et l., 2016). Too much use of textism, even though is found to have no effect on grammatical performance, it is feared may affect people’s writing habits that may deteriorate their general ways of writing language. The use of “u r” when writing language in an English course indicates that the intensive use of textism may affect the brain on how to write words and unknowingly, a student may find him/herself writing in textism. To avoid that, it is best to train the brain to write words in full always to avoid risks of having grammatical errors when writing language. In addition, it is always good to proofread written work to check on the use of textism to remove them by replacing them with complete words. Another way of ensuring grammatical writing is to appreciate the disadvantages of using textism. van Dijk, et al. (2016) mention about weakened the ability to spell a word correctly. Textism can make the brain to forget easily how a word is spelt and what it always remembers is its short form. Struggling to remember how a word is spelt correctly also slows down the speed of writing and that demands a person to go back to reading many written texts to make the brain recall how to spell words correctly. Thus, textism is bad, makes one become a poor writer and should always be avoided.

References

van Dijk, C. N., van Witteloostuijn, M., Vasic, N., Avrutin, S. & Blom, E. (2016). The influence of texting language on grammar and executive functions in primary school children. PLoS One, 11(3). Doi:10.1371/journal.pone.01524091.