Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

On the 24th of March 2014, you published an online article titled, “Twtr? It’s majorly bad! Leading headteacher condemns ‘text speak’ for eroding schoolchildren’s language skills”. I thought it was a very interesting article and would like to share some of my thoughts and concerns about it.

To begin with, I would like to say that the article was very biased towards the negative side of -as mentioned in the article- “text speak”. It was all based on one person’s perspective on the situation, and for someone who works for an online news company, you would think to get the entire story before publishing something as inconsiderate as this. Ms. Caroline Jordan, the head of the top private girl's school in Oxford seems as if she did not think all her facts through before speaking publicly. It may seem as if I am disagreeing with the article, but I am not entirely. I personally, expected another claim or person to come in and contradict the points Ms. Jordan was aggregating. With this being said, I would like to give my view on the argument.

Texting has affected the literacy and grammar of students all over the world but the fact of the matter is that this is not entirely true. It is almost not true at all. Ms. Jordan complains as to how the students writing skills are decreasing immensely overtime due to texting and social media. American linguist, John McWhorter stated that texting is not writing. Language started as speech, how people were talking. Writing only arose much later in time. Realistically, the way you write is not the way you casually speak. Language is just speech, language is not writing. Of course, as time has passed, there have been interactions between speech and writing but over the years, it is called the development of speech. The way we talk to each other will never stop developing. A hundred years ago a professor was complaining about how his students were not using correct grammar in their writing. Fifty years ago another professor complained that his students were also not using correct grammar. And today, Ms. Jordan is complaining how her students do not use correct grammar either. The only difference between Ms. Jordan and the professor that lived a hundred years ago is that the hundred-year-old professor is not blaming it on social media.

When you are texting, (or writing), you typically want to write like you speak. It seems unnatural to speak the way you write. Texting is a lot looser in its structure. When you are speaking, you don’t have to worry about capital letters, commas, exclamation marks etc. and that causes you to not think about those things when you are texting either. Therefore when a student is writing, their natural instincts are to write the way they speak, so that it is easier for the other person to receive the message quickly. I understand Ms. Jordan's concern as to how students are not writing or speaking the “traditional way”, but was there ever a proper traditional way in the first place? Language and speech have evolved over time causing people to speak differently. If the professor from fifty years ago was to read text messages between two seventeen-year-old girls today, he would not understand the language. It is possible that in fifty years, we might not understand “text speak” either, but this is called development.

If you would like another perspective on this topic, I would suggest contacting Mr. McWhorter to give you his personal opinion.

Thank you for your time,

Natasha Esterhuizen