Texting harms grammatical ability.

My opponent presented three points in R1 before citing empirical studies that corroborate these claims. I will respond to these points one by one. R1) Texting forces users to use bad grammarMy opponent asserts that texting obliges, and thus cultivates, bad grammar. Firstly, I challenge the premise of this statement. As I have written in the previous round, texting is not poor grammar. It is does utilise many forms of non-standard orthography (which is not, as per the definitions laid out in R1, encompassed by grammar, as it is not related to syntactic or morphological accuracy). However, texters do not use an 'ungrammatical' version of standard English. Textisms are grammatical in the 'dialect' of textspeak; textspeak simply isn't standard English. (2) Moreover, only around 6% of the text messages are abbreviated, according to Ling's Norwegian study of a text message corpus (1). Contrary to my opponent's claims, developments in smartphone technology no longer necessitate the use of brief texts. Although a conventional mobile forces its users to use briefer texts because of the clumsiness of input, smartphone users can use functions like spellcheck and autocorrect to type in messages. For example, the Android system, which I use, allows me to type long, complex sentences which are grammatically and orthographically accurate. Furthermore, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger don't limit the maximum length of a message. It must also be noted that 40% of text messages by women and 25% of text messages by men contain multiple sentences (1). This statistic was recorded in the old days; now, lifted restrictions and improved technology have likely racketed up this percentage. To further test the claim that text messages are ungrammatical, I have taken a look at the first ten texts of DamnFunnyTexts. com. Most of them are complete sentences; in fact, complex hypertactic constructions like second conditionals are present. I have spotted no morphosyntactic errors, although nonstandard orthography was present. Texting does not increase exposure to poor grammar. Finally, the validity of this argument hinges on the tenuous link between the putative ungrammaticality of text messaging and the use of non-standard forms of English where standard forms are expected. I will show in the other rebuttals that my opponent has failed to demonstrate this. R2) Frequency of textingSecondly, my opponent claims that the frequency of texting undermines grammatical ability because people learn to write grammatically through exposure to grammatically correct texts. There are several problems with this. Firstly, texts do not decrease people's exposure to writing in Standard English. Even the most avid texter can peruse the works of renowned writers, past and present, as well as respectable periodicals like The Guardian, The Washington Post or The Daily Telegraph. One could argue that frequent texting decreases their exposure to reading high-quality texts because they have less time to invest in them, but the same can be said of computer gaming, sports, music or any other non-reading hobby. Unless we accept that these also cause poor grammar, we cannot say the same about texting. Secondly, my opponent claims that increased exposure to sentence fragments in texts implies that children will get less exposure to proper grammar. However, sentence fragments are not ungrammatical. They are unacceptable in formal writing, but they still obey the syntactic rules of a language. For example, no native speaker would text ungrammatical fragments like these the ones with *: (1) A: What did you do to my cakes? B: Ate them/*I ate. (2) A: How is he doing? B: Better than he is/*Better than he's. The first example shows that sentence fragments must be constituents (blocks of words functioning as a unit) in the syntax of a language, such as clause, verb phrase, etc. 'I ate' is a subject plus an transitive verb with no object, and not a constituent of the full sentence 'I ate the flowers', so native speakers do not write this. By contrast, 'ate them' is a verb phrase constituent, so native texters accept this. (3) The second text demonstrates that sentence fragments still obey grammatical rules: contractions are not allowed at the end of a sentence. Clearly, sentence fragments aren't poor grammar. If anything, they allow users to familiarise themselves with constituent groupings in the syntax of a language, as we have seen from (1). The only possible deleterious effect of continued exposure to sentence fragments is the propensity to use them in formal texts. But even that is a dubious claim because there's another, far more common source of sentence fragments that dwarfs texting: Speech. If exposure to sentence fragments were indeed insidious, it would be speech, not texting, that is the main contributor. Of course, that is not true because writing is a learnt skill, and speech must precede the learning of writing. R3) Children are texting more and moreFinally, my opponent claims that children had not had adequate exposure to written texts before texting, and may pick up improper grammar from there. However, all of the examples presented by my opponent were orthographical: they were either spelling problems (alot, their, etc. ) or punctuation problems (comma splices). In fact, the 'alot' error demonstrates, if anything, grammatical competence: 'a lot', unlike other classifiers, has become a morphological atom, or morpheme, that has a single meaning (a large amount or very often). Texters confuse grammatical and orthographical words, and fail to separate 'a' and 'lot' by a space. An orthographical inaccuracy reveals underlying grammatical knowledge. Moreover, my opponent claims that children have had no exposure to accurate grammar before they learn to text. Yet most of the grammar teaching occurs in the first few years of life; later education only plays a shaping role. For example, research has shown that practically no two- to four-year-olds make the error I showed in (2) above. Nor would most native English-speaking child produce sentences like 'You went there when? ' or 'I you love' (which, incidentally, are grammatical in French) by the time they reach school age. Plus, as David Crystal points out, children learn to write before they learn to text. Only good writers are capable of texting. This is the reason why children who text are, empirically, better readers and writers (as shown in the study I cited last round). (1)Finally, the errors my opponent cited do not come from texting. Texting does not compel people to write 'there' instead of 'their' (they involve the same number of keystrokes) or comma splices (most sentences in texts are short). One user on this site does not text, yet thought 'dilemma' was written 'dilemna' until correction by spellcheck (which, incidentally, texters have extensive exposure to). (5) Children cannot possibly pick up these errors from texting alone; the cause must be somewhere else. It is the skill of the English teacher and not the prevalence of texting that is responsible for these mistakes. R4) Empirical evidenceMy opponent cites two studies to support the above arguments. The first is rife with statistical and methodological inadequacies. Firstly, it was obvious to the participants that the study was about the effect of texting on grammar, which can lead to a small bias. Secondly, they seemed to be fishing for correlations: they demanded a motley of independent factors from the tweens, and the majority, e. g. total text messages, perceived usability of texting, television and music consumption, etc. had no effect on grammatical ability. The only significant factors found were grade and average sent adaptations. The latter, however, explains only 4.7% of the variance in grammar scores, an extremely small effect. Moreover, they only had 20 questions in their assessment, many of which tested orthography, not grammar: (7) My opponent misinterpreted the second study. They did not study morpheme use but morphological awareness, a measure of metalinguistic ability. We use tacit grammatical knowledge when we write, so lower metalinguistic ability does not entail poorer grammatical competence. Here's an analogy: you don't need to know which muscles to move, as long as you can ride a bike. They did record negative correlations between frequency of texting and texting adaptions, and reading. The probem is, they did not find non-texters for comparison. Texting may still have an overall positive correlation with reading ability, although suffering negative marginal returns with greater frequency. Textism use may be deleterious, but its effects may not override the positive effect of texting. Finally, the participants may also be biased: They were told about the purpose of the study, and given course credit for participation. No wonder the authors themselves only claimed that texting hurting grammar was a possibility. (7)Sources in comments