Text Messaging in Complete Sentences

The text message is a brilliant addition to technological communication. It’s a quick and easy way to communicate short bits of information to people with minimal interruption. However, the text message is responsible for exponentially accelerating the decline of the English language into gibberish and smiley face symbols. Email has done its part to initiate this descent, but the text message requires more dexterity, oftentimes in less ideal situations than sitting in front of a computer to type an email. This added complexity implicates a need for extreme brevity.

Composing a text message in a complete sentence format, or at least using full words has three advantages – the first being that you are declining to engage your recipient in pedestrian exchanges of words without consonants or cutesy phrases made up soley for the novelty of their misspellings, the second being that your recipient CAN UNDERSTAND YOU; and thirdly, it’s a way to take a stand for the proper use of the English language, a way to continue to craft and compose a written communication to another person.

We tell our small children to “use their words” when they attempt to cajole us into providing them with something. Yet, children in grammar school (there’s irony there) are turning in papers with text messaging and instant messaging lingo written in them. When do we stop encouraging children to “use their words” and instead provide them with gadgets that enable them to take the cutesy, lazy approach to language, gadgets that limit their vocabulary and reduce their communication to emoticons?

In my opinion, there is a reason Western Union recently ceased transmitting telegrams, that reason being we have invented much more advanced technologies that allow us to communicate with one another freely and in complete sentences. Even if text messaging in complete sentences takes a few more seconds to compose, it shows you care.