Texting harms grammatical ability.

Texting has become ubiquitous as a form of communication, especially among teens; this has lead to concerns over the possible negative impacts of texting. Concerned parents have begun to worry about the way texting could affect their children's ability to speak in a grammatically correct way. Here, in this debate, I seek to show that their concerns are legitimate and that texting can hurt people's ability to communicate with proper grammar. I believe that there are three reasons why texting can harm grammatical ability: firstly, the way texting discourages the use of proper grammar, secondly, the ubiquity of texting, and finally, the fact that children might not be able to distinguish between proper and improper grammar. Texting is detrimental to people's ability of grasping grammar. Texting practically forces its users to use bad grammar. Every text must be brief, both because the length of a text must be below 160 characters and because it is difficult to type long paragraphs using a smartphone keyboard, whether it's a touchscreen software keyboard or an old-fashioned hardware keyboard with only a few keys that sometimes necessitated pressing a key multiple times in order to get a desired character to be typed. With this imposed brevity, users have to use shorthands and contractions or even omit words entirely in order to convey anything meaningful. These methods used to shorten messages mean that they are rarely, if ever, composed of full sentences. While people can occasionally dabble in writing grammatically incorrect sentence fragments from time to time without ruining their grammar skills, texting is different in that its ubiquity makes it far more dangerous to one's grammatical ability. For some children, tapping out improperly spelled words with a smartphone is the main way they communicate with their peers; face-to-face interactions have long been replaced with communication facilitated through technology. Being exposed mostly to the sentence fragments found in text messages means that children would get less exposure to proper grammar, and a person who is not exposed to proper grammar would not be able to learn grammatical rules, as learning happens through exposure. Even as an adult, one's grammatical skills can deteriorate over time through the lack of exposure that being obsessed with texting would entail. Children, who are increasingly using texting to communicate with their peers, might be the worst hit. Without a lot of exposure to proper written texts, a child might not be able to distinguish between proper and improper grammer due to the fact that he has not read enough full sentences to understand English's syntactical rules. This means that children might begin to pick up improper grammar thinking that it is proper; they would begin to spell "a lot" as "alot", confuse "their" with "there", "were" with "where", and believe that one can join an arbitrarily long list of independent clauses into one single sentence with commas. Texting harms the children the most. The above are simply conclusions that are easily derived from logical reasoning and anecdotal evidence; however, real scholarly research into the effects of texting does exist, and they suggest that texting can spell doom for the English language as we know it, torturing it through misspellings like "dilemna" and "alot". A Penn State University study suggests that tweens who text more end up with worse grammar, possibly due to them mimicking the other tweens' way of using text speak and not switching back to correct grammar when it is demanded, [1] while another study said that texting may harm the texter's ability to properly use morphemes. [2] As you can see, I have shown that texting can be detrimental to one's ability to write properly, both through logic and through citing scholarly studies. As such, I think that it should be resolved that texting harms one's grammatical ability. If you habitually exercise your thumbs through texting, watch out: you might be doing yourself and your grammar skills a disservice. [1]http://news.psu.edu... [2]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...