Explore the view that texting and/or web based interactions can be creative forms of language use. Essay Example

Some people argue that texting or other web based interactions can be creative forms of language use. Others believe that people only use these forms of communication due to laziness, or just lack of knowledge of the English language. In my opinion; texting is a mixture of both. Common ‘text language’ includes abbreviating many different words, which in my opinion requires a certain level of intellect and knowledge of the English language to be able to do in the first place. However, I also understand that this language is becoming so common and accepted to an extent that people are learning the abbreviations as a substitute of learning the full English terms.
During a text conversation between a mother and son, the son (Andy) effectively uses ‘phonetic representation’ in his text message. This is because he types “wot” instead of “what”. This is creative as it saves time, as it’s only a three letter word combination, as apposed to four. Not only this, people could argue that this could also save money in some circumstances. This is because most phone networks have a character limit on texting, meaning you can only type a certain amount of letters or symbols before you would have the pay to send a second text, in order to send all of the content inside the text message. Although this could be applied to some examples, considering Andy’s full text is not very long, I strongly doubt there would be any limitations that would affect the sending of this text message. Another reason why Andy might of typed “wot” instead of “what” could be because he’s in a rush. Despite this, I do not believe this is the case as if you read on past this line of text, you discover that Andy is waiting to be picked up, and most likely not in a rush. For this I can analyse that Andy is probably typing “wot” because of laziness.