Journal 4

In this essay, Koehler discusses that texting is harming the English language. I do not agree with her, even though she does make several points. She claims that the full meaning of something can't be understood with texting abbreviations. Her example of a text version of Hamlet isn't really a good example because who would want to shorten Hamlet's famous words? Those lines are so famous and memorized all of the time, so I don't think that anyone would really even consider texting that play. She also describes when the idea of text messaging was created and how it came about from the English language. She says that we have to even abbreviate the length of our messages because most phones can only do 160 characters. My phone can do 6-160 character messages, so I don't really have to abbreviate my length of message too much. The reason that texting is quick is because there is a lot of abbreviations. If we had to conscientiously think about "proper" grammar while texting, texting wouldn't be quick or popular anymore and people would have to try to find some other means of communicating quickly. There are many styles of writing which makes life interesting. Life would be very boring if the only way we could write was the "proper and formal" way. It is wonderful to have a broad range of writing styles from formal research papers to texting. These are all types of writing, just different ways of communicating to certain people in certain ways. We will never loose our English language because we are always forced to use it whether we are writing a paper for school, reading a Shakespeare play, applying for a job, or writing a novel.