In a faculty workshop on commenting on student writing that Diana and I facilitated last week, we discussed the feeling of being overwhelmed by such “lower order” concerns as spelling and grammatical errors and stylistic problems. One technique to counteract this is WAC guru John Bean’s “pet peeve” approach. Pick one or two of your own personal pet peeves about students’ writing, such as use of passive voice or subject-verb agreement, and restrict your lower order comments only to these pet peeves. You can even change it up every semester.
Now, when I first read about this approach, I immediately thought of my number one pet peeve: students’ use of texting lingo in their writing. You know, “Marx wants u 2 throw off ur chains but Durkheim says those chains are solidarity LOL.”
But according to David Crystal, author of txtng: the gr8 db8, text-messaging is a new linguistic form that helps build literacy. He writes,
All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. Nor is its use restricted to the young generation. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of the language uses its distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages may seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, indeed, but its long-term impact on the already existing varieties of language is likely to be negligible. It is not a bad thing.
So, am I being a technophobic Luddite every time I want to circle in bright red pen every single instance of txt-speak in my students’ papers? You can read an excerpt of his book and hear Crystal expound on this more at NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
You are by no means being a technophobic Luddite! It is one thing to accept the use of text-speak IN text messages. Even in email. But a completely other thing to accept it in formal written work. It would be equivalent to accepting slang (and maybe some professors do accept that). But if it isn’t okay for students to write, for example, “some think this change is no big whoop, but XXX argues that it’s a freaking awesome development” (or something to that effect), then it isn’t okay for students to use “r” instead “are” in their academic work. It’s a different context and it requires a different mode of writing and students need to be able to code switch.
Luddites of the world unite!No more texting in college writing! I am so with you on this.
I agree that expository college essays are an inappropriate context for texting shorthand but I do agree with Crystal all in all.
By the way…
“Marx wants u 2 throw off ur chains but Durkheim says those chains are solidarity LOL.”
Absolutely brilliant.
@Luke: OMG thx!Here’s a serious question about the appropriateness of txtng in academia, though: what about blogs in the classroom? Is text-speak okay in that arena? Or should students follow the conventions of formal writing? Is this a judgment call on the part of the professor?
We had a good discussion about this at a roundtable with Great Works faculty yesterday. Students must learn to be able to assess the conventions at work in any particular exchange, and writing in both informal and formal ways about course material on a weblog can help them learn to do that.
In most cases, text-speak will just not suffice on a course blog– though it’s up to the professor to set the expectations and define the audience for which the student is writing. The definition of “informal” we see on most course blogs rejects texting– these are more instances of freewriting that give a student the opportunity to form their thoughts and the faculty member to intervene where they may see grammatical or other kinds of recurring errors. Informal writing is most often employed as a step in a process towards more formal assignments.
An effective communicator must be able to adapt their voice and their writing to the conventions that prevail in the situation at hand, and I think it’s part of the liberal arts mission to help students become more discerning communicators. Only in rare cases in higher education, imo, is txtng lingo aprpr8.
Luke, when is texting lingo appropriate in higher education? Maybe I am turning into a “texting-lingo-conservative?
Here’s one, maybe: imagine a synchronous chat room discussion with lots of participants and a quick interchange of ideas…. a blended class, or maybe a class with no f2f interaction. One student says to another:
“Ru saying that that Bgr Thomas is 2 blame for his own problems? That’s reductive, imo.”
Now, as a professor, do you jump in and criticize the way the student has made his/her point? Or do you get out of the way and let the discussion proceed? I think you bring it up later, and say that that formulation was fine for the chat room, but would be unacceptable for more formal written assignments.
I read this with interest as when I am marking it irks me to no end to see texting in my assignments. In the end I think Luke is totally correct in “ I think you bring it up later, and say that that formulation was fine for the chat room, but would be unacceptable for more formal written assignments.” Unlike David Crystal, of txtng: the gr8 db8, fame, I do not believe that text-messaging is a new linguistic form that helps build literacy. I think that if used in formal papers and assignments, texting should be penalized. If used as say, shorthand used to be, it could be a faster way of writing thoughts down.
This prompts a very different response from me. I find myself wondering about the appearance of “texting lingo” at all in student writing. I can’t recall having encountered it. This is possibly because the writing I assign is all take-home essays and students formally type the work up before they hand it in. Is text lingo simply a quick way to write when one is in a hurry to set thoughts down in class?
But it also occurs to me that it may in part be generational. On the first day of class (and on several occasions thereafter, when the topic arises spontaneously for one reason or another) I explain to students that I am not of the cell phone generation and that when I observe them texting in my class I experience it not as a normal part of everyday life but as a comment on the poor quality of my teaching—i.e., I’m so boring, they’d rather be doing something else. I then go on to explain that while I understand that their generation has a very different perspective on this, it’s my classroom and we abide by my rules. So they’re aware that I’m not sympathetic to texting and thus consciously avoid it. Many of you are of the roughly the same generation as our undergrads and they may assume that it’s the most natural way to communicate with you. So if you’re having trouble with students using texting lingo, perhaps you can occasionally don the mantle of an old fuddy-duddy like me and instill a little fear, or at least a little caution, in them.