A study found that the more students text, the more it may impact their grammar. A new infographic, prepared by OnlineCollege.org, explores how does this happen and why does it matter.
It’s important to note the existence of techspeak, which uses abbreviations and acronyms to make for shorter messages. This shortened language allows users to type more quickly, especially if the number of characters they can use is limiting. For example “see” becomes “c”, “to” becomes “2”, while punctuation and capitalization are ignored for the most part.
On average boys send 2,539 texts per months, girls – 4,050, and young adults – 1,630. Middle school students are the most likely to use techspeak. But middle school is when students’ formative learning years occur. So we’re not surprised by the survey results:
- 50% of surveyed teens said they do not use proper punctuation or grammatical marks when writing text or instant messages.
- 11% said they thought electronic communications had a negative impact on their writing skills.
- 86% of adolescents think having good writing skills is important for success in life.
The major offenders, in case you want to know, include punctuation errors, apostrophe errors, emoticon usage, abbreviations such as “cuz” and sentence fragments… Check out the infographic with even more data below.
