2b or Not 2b by David Crystal
Rylee Kay
Jamie McBeth-Smith
English 1010-053
9/16/14
“2b or Not 2b” by David Crystal
Is texting making our language worse or is it improving it? David Crystal, “a professor at the University of Wales and is known for his work in English language studies and linguistics” (335), writes about how many people think that texting is destroying our language, but Crystal believes that texting can improve children’s ability to read and write, he also writes that texting may add a new dimension to communication in an article called “2b or Not 2b”. In the article Crystal starts off with a quote by John Humphry, he believes that texters are “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped” (335). As a response, Crystal states that people have always thought that any new technology will destroy our language. He also talks about how people believe that texting will make people spell worse because they are always abbreviating them in text messages. He talks about how a lot of the time people don’t always text abbreviations. He believes that abbreviations people use is negligible compared to the amount of texted words people send. Crystal states that many of the abbreviations we’ve come to associate with texting has been in conversation and literature generations older than texting. Crystal ends by saying “There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline.” (345)
I believe that David Crystal is right that texting is improving our English language rather than destroying it. It was really interesting reading about how the kids who did the most abbreviations were better at writing and spelling, but it really does make a lot of sense when you think about it because you could not abbreviate a word if you didn’t
Jamie McBeth-Smith
English 1010-053
9/16/14
“2b or Not 2b” by David Crystal
Is texting making our language worse or is it improving it? David Crystal, “a professor at the University of Wales and is known for his work in English language studies and linguistics” (335), writes about how many people think that texting is destroying our language, but Crystal believes that texting can improve children’s ability to read and write, he also writes that texting may add a new dimension to communication in an article called “2b or Not 2b”. In the article Crystal starts off with a quote by John Humphry, he believes that texters are “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped” (335). As a response, Crystal states that people have always thought that any new technology will destroy our language. He also talks about how people believe that texting will make people spell worse because they are always abbreviating them in text messages. He talks about how a lot of the time people don’t always text abbreviations. He believes that abbreviations people use is negligible compared to the amount of texted words people send. Crystal states that many of the abbreviations we’ve come to associate with texting has been in conversation and literature generations older than texting. Crystal ends by saying “There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline.” (345)
I believe that David Crystal is right that texting is improving our English language rather than destroying it. It was really interesting reading about how the kids who did the most abbreviations were better at writing and spelling, but it really does make a lot of sense when you think about it because you could not abbreviate a word if you didn’t
Cited: Crystal, David. "2b or Not 2b." They Say / I Say: the Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Ed. Cathy Birkenstein, Gerald Graff, and Russel Durst. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 391-393. Print.