Unpopular Culture

One trend of contemporary popular culture that is bad for society would have to be the text messaging language used by many younger generations. The text messaging language has if fact ruined current students ability to use proper grammar and spelling. In one study called "The National Text Messaging Bee?" they asked the students ranging from young kindergartners to preteens a riddle where the answer was giraffe and everyone got it right except one person and the point was to show how many different spellings the students came up with. Some examples from this study are, " garaph, graiffe, giraff, girraff, jeraf, geraff, giraiffe and draff." Another study called "The impact of text messaging language shortcuts on developmental students' formal writing skills" argues that students are unable to differentiate between text messaging and academic writing. The author in this article, Sherry Rankin, tries to explain that text messages shows students to take shortcuts around proper spelling and grammar. I myself sometimes have experienced this in my writing I will put U instead of you and I don't notice this in my papers until I proofread it but sometimes it will take a few times to go over it and proofread to even notice it. This study also argues that people who text heavily also force teachers to try and adapt their teaching styles to fix and help students low literacy skills, they tend to be the ones who text the most.

 The study showed that when people who text a lot started writing they were the ones with the most breaks and most grammatical errors. But once they were given a cell phone their responses to text messages were immediate and they made all the same mistakes but the people they were texting did not even notice or bring it up. Another study showed that people who are texting right before or during a paper will make 35% more errors than someone who is taking their time and not texting. After I saw all this research that goes into this I decided that it is bad because it also makes it acceptable by people for someone to misspell something or have grammatical errors. As a young preteen or teenager who will influence you the teacher who is telling you what to do or your friend that accept you for all the flaws. So I believe this also has a big impact on this because kids now are happier being accepted in a group than they are being judged or graded. So if people don’t tell you every mistake you make in a text message and just let it slide then you see it as what is acceptable. Teachers are grading you and writing down every single mistake you make and showing you everything that is wrong and people react negatively to this. Although there is no way to stop this at all their needs to be some kind of common ground found so that people can still use their short texting and still have proper grammar.

Works Cited

Rankin, Sherry. “"The impact of text messaging language shortcuts on developmental students' formal writing skills".Walden University. 2010

Sobotinic, Marilyn. “The National Text Messaging Bee?”.Children and Libraries.Winter 2008