Daniel Garcia Garrigo

UWRT 1102

Ms. Leah Huizar

01/12/17

JOURNAL 1

Writing is used for basically everything nowadays. It can communicate any type

of information and over time, it has become one of the most useful tools of human

development. We use writing to communicate with each other, transmit information,

entertain, advertise, teach... The possibilities are almost infinite, and your creativity and

imagination can take language and writing to shapes that could be unfamiliar to others.

That has been the case of the development of texting and texting language, as David

Crystal explains in his article "2b or not 2b". He argues that texting is actually good for

language and it helps us with our spelling and grammatical abilities. He mentions

multiple studies that have been conducted over the years, and contrary to popular belief,

texting has found out to be very useful. When texting started, many people thought that

it was going to be a disaster to the language and that many words would eventually be

extinct due to the use of abbreviations. Regarding this, studies have shown that only

10% of texts contain abbreviations, and that the use of abbreviations actually shows a

certain level of understanding of the language and the sounds of those words.

Furthermore, some of these abbreviations have existed more than 50 years before

texting even started.

As the author says, "There is no point to send a message if it breaks so many

rules that it ceases to be intelligible". Also, you can tell what person has sent a message
by the way he or she writes. We all text in different styles, and this wouldn't happen if

we all wrote in Standard English when we text.

I think David's opinion about texting is totally true and acceptable. I like one of

the sentences, where he writes about texting, "It's creative potential has been virtually

ignored". Texting has many properties that can help us improve our writing skills in

many ways. Since the article was published (2008), texting has seen a massive

expansion with the introduction of smartphones and touch screens, and now, more than

ever, the amount of people that write everyday using new technologies has increased a

lot.