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According to Job Bank USA, numerous employers have complained of the sheer volume of job applications they receive written in text language [1]. In particular they note that many applicants have a tendency to speak informally and use text message abbreviations, giving the impression that they are corresponding with an old friend rather than a potential employer. Such prospective applicants seem therefore poorly educated, lazy, and unprofessional. Needless to say, in most cases such applications are thrown in the bin and never thought of again.

Text messaging is now the world’s most popular form of communication (overtaking emails and even face-to-face conversation), with 5 trillion SMS messages sent worldwide in 2009. In addition to this, more than 65 million Twitter messages (or tweets) are sent daily, along with 4 billion messages on Facebook. Because users are limited to messages of only 140 characters in length for Twitter and 160 characters for a text message, a whole new way of writing has emerged – which involves foregoing punctuation and contracting words or using acronyms to save space. For example, common contractions include: ‘great’ becoming ‘g8’, ‘you’ becoming ‘u’, ‘the’ becoming ‘da’, ‘because’ becoming ‘cuz’, ‘talk to you later’ becoming ‘TTYL’ and ‘laugh out loud’ being written as ‘LOL’ (though some older users use ‘LOL’ to denote ‘Lots of Love’). These contractions are at the heart of the concern about declining literacy.

Shanahan points to the more than 30 billion e-mail messages and 5 billion text messages that are exchanged every day as evidence of how technology “is raising the value of reading in our society, both as an economic and as a social activity.”

Is Texting Killing the English Language?

“I think it makes sense for these social conversations to be lightweight or light-hearted in terms of the syntax,” said President of Dictionary.com Shravan Goli. “But ultimately, in the world of business and in the world they will live in, in terms of their jobs and professional lives, students will need good, solid reading and writing skills. I’m a little worried about where we are in America with literacy levels dropping. Are these [electronic devices] helping us, or making it worse? I think they may be going the other way and making it worse.”