Can Texting Damage Writing Skills?
Can Texting Damage Writing Skills?
I often talk to my students about whether they feel texting has caused people to have more difficulties with their writing skills. I personally see a lot of first-year students who abbreviate quite a bit, lack punctuation skills and don’t write in complete sentences.
Young and younger children are receiving cell phones. It may make parents feel safer knowing they can reach their children. Tweens are learning to type in text abbreviations which may affect their ability to write well. WJS.com reported “The average 13- to 17-year-old sends and receives 3,339 texts a month—more than 100 per day, according to the Nielsen Co., the media research firm. Adults are catching up. People from ages 45 to 54 sent and received 323 texts a month in the second quarter of 2010, up 75% from a year ago.”
Eudopia.org recently posted a survey asking the following question to see if text messaging is harming students’ writing skills: “IYO txtng = NME or NBD?” If you have no idea what that means . . . Translation: “In your opinion, is text messaging the enemy, or no big deal?”
PiercePioneer.com asked, Mike Darcher, English instructor for 20 years if he felt texting was hurting our students’ writing ability. He said he could not make the connection of bad texting habits being carried over into student’s writing. “In terms of writing skills, there is no way of measuring its impact,” Darcher said.
TimesDaily reported the results of a report of a study from Pew Internet and American Life Project. “The study was prompted in large part because of growing concerns over how text-based electronic communications affect the writing ability of students who are immersed in electronic media. Out of 700 youth aged 12-17 who participated in the phone survey, 60 percent say they don’t consider electronic communications – e-mail, instant messaging, mobile text – to be writing in the formal sense; 63 percent say it has no impact on the writing they do for school and 64 percent report inadvertently using some form of shorthand common to electronic text, including emotions, incorrect grammar or punctuation.”
Some linguists are mixed on the effect of texting on writing skills. There are those who think that this may not last and may just go the way of some slang words that are no longer used. Some think that learning texting is just like learning another language. As long as the students can keep them separated, then they see no problem with it.
Texting may be a passing thing, but it is definitely here for now. If you are trying to figure out what that text is or that abbreviation that someone sent you, you might want to check out the following list from the Vancouver Sun:
The top 10 commonly used abbreviations in texting — translated to plain English:
– 411 — All the information
– BBIAS — Be back in a second (also BBIF — be back in a few, and BBL — be back later)
– BFN — Bye for now
– ETA — Estimated time of arrival (used for deadlines and when to expect something/someone)
– FYI — For your information
– KK — Okay, okay (I understand what you’re saying)
– LOL — Laugh out loud
– OMG — Oh my God
– TTYL — Talk to you later (also TTYS — talk to you soon)
– UOK — Are you okay?
If you want to know what your kids are saying to each other, here are some common text abbreviations to watch for. Parent alerts include:
– PAW or 9 — Parents are watching
– POV — Parent over shoulder
– CD9 — Code 9, meaning Parents are around
– P911 — Parents coming into room alert
– PIR — Parents in room
– PSOS — Parent standing over shoulder
– KPC — Keeping parents clueless
– NP — Nosy parents (But this is also used as “no problem”)
Want to know your kids’ relationship status? Nothing to be alarmed about if they text:
– LYLAB — Love you like a brother
– LYLAS — Love you like a sister
– LDR — Long distance relationship
But you don’t want to see:
– 420 — Let’s get high/marijuana use
– LGH — Let’s get high
– LH6 — Let’s have sex
– LHOS — Let’s have online sex
– LIK — Liquor
How is their day going? Here are a few common indicators:
– 2MTH — Too much to handle
– ADIH — Another day in hell
– ADIP — Another day in paradise
– LTHTT — Laughing too hard to type
– HHIS — Head hanging in shame
– CWOT — Complete waste of time
– IMSB — I’m so bored
– BOOMS — Bored out of my skull
– 121 — One to one (private chat invitation)
If your son or daughter texts you a status report, you should be familiar with:
– BHL8 — Be home late
– CUL8R — See you later
– G2G — Got to go
– G2R — Got to run
– ILBL8 — I’ll be late
– TTYL — Talk to you later
What is Web Scraping?
A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. The purpose of creating such a site can be to collect advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine rankings by linking to other sites to improve their search engine ranking.
There are now some sites that are working on finding out even more information about you through scraping.
Scraping for Your Real Name
PeekYou.com has applied for a patent for a way to, among other things, match people’s real names to pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and online forums.
In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, they wrote about how scrapers broke into sites like PatientsLikeMe to find out information about patients to sell data about consumers to drug makers. To read this very interesting article, click here.
It is disturbing to think that people are in medial chatrooms pretending to be patients in order to find out what drugs are being prescribed. That kind woman you are chatting with about your hot flashes just may be a guy keeping track of your medical history. For information on how to remove some of your personal details from the Internet, check out wsj.com/wtk.
Are You Satisfied With Your Career Path?
![[SATISFY]](https://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BG695_SATISF_NS_20101010180444.gif)
Many people are in transition between careers due to the economy right now. A lot of them are changing original focus in life and switching industries. In my book, How to Reinvent Your Career, I wrote about how people sometimes find that the career or education they received when they were younger, may no longer interest them as they age.
I found an article in the Wall Street Journal that included the above chart to be interesting because it ties into something I wrote about in my book. Many of the jobs and opportunities that are now available, were not available when many of us first began our career.
The above chart shows that the MIS or Management Information Systems major was more satisfied than some of the other popular majors. When I received my first degree from Arizona State University in the 80s, MIS was not an option as the Internet and PCs were not available to the general public yet. MIS is about collecting information and providing that information for the organization to run smoothly. Computers are a big part of the MIS program.
If you are considering making a career change, this chart may give you an idea of some of the fields that lead to a more satisfying career path. Note on the chart, it states that the grades were asked if the set of jobs available were deemed satisfying, well-aid and with growth potential. If those are important goals for you this information may be helpful. What is important is to decide what your goals are and pick your major or career based upon those goals.
Facebook Tweaks Allow Friends to Sort Those They Really ‘Like’
There is no denying that Facebook news grabs attention. With the recent movie release, Facebook has been mentioned in many news articles. Other than movie news, though, there have been some new changes that Facebook has incorporated. Do you have a lot of friends and find it difficult to keep track of it all? Facebook has made their site more user-friendly, allowing for sorting of friends. You can now find information you really care about on your Facebook site. Check out the recent article by Geoffrey Fowler from the Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Inc. unveiled three features Wednesday that it hopes will make using the social-networking site more friendly.
The new features are designed to give users more control over how they share personal information on the site with other people and third-party applications. In the past, some users and privacy advocates have complained that Facebook made it difficult to tailor communication for different types of people, such as co-workers or close friends, as people do in the real world.
The biggest change for users will be the new groups feature, which allows people to identify small circles of friends on the site, and share specific information and communicate with just those people. Users can decide whether the groups are public or private, and choose which information they want to share with each group.
At an event at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that giving people more control over how they communicate with different kinds of friends is the “big problem” that social networks face, and required a “social solution” rather than a technical one. “A lot of people talk about this as a privacy problem,” Mr. Zuckerberg said of the desire to share information with subsets of friends. “But more than that, it is an annoying problem.”
The other two new features Facebook unveiled address data control issues that had been raised by privacy advocates. One is a dashboard feature that allows users to keep track of information-sharing settings from third-party apps, such as plug-ins to other websites. The dashboard also displays exactly what personal information those apps are pulling from the social network. Previously, users could only adjust individual privacy settings for apps.
Chris Conley, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said the move was a step in the right direction, but the dashboard also needed to show what information users’ friends’ apps might be accessing about them, such as birthdays or interests. A Facebook spokeswoman said the friends’ apps issue was on the company’s radar.
The third new feature allows people to export the information they have entered into Facebook into one compressed zip file.
Tainted Tylenol Ethical Issues
I teach several different ethics courses where we look at individual companies and how they handled ethical issues. Beech-nut selling a product they called apple juice that technically had no apples in it, was a classic case example of a non-ethical way to do business.
In the 80s, Johnson and Johnson had to deal with tainted Tylenol (The Tylenol Murders) due to product tampering. Their quick and responsive resolution to a potentially imagine-ruining situation has made J&J stand out as a good example of an ethical business.
Now J&J’s reputation has come into question though as they used bacteria-tainted materials to create their children’s Tylenol. Although they claim that only the raw material was tainted and the finished product showed no reports of illness, the company had to recall their product. The Wall Street Journal reported, “J&J’s handling of the problem has become a focus of a congressional investigation into manufacturing problems. J&J has issued more than a half dozen recalls of popular over-the-counter medicines over the past year.”