The Effects of txt spk on this Generation's Literacy

      I was around twelve when my family first got AOL and we had internet in the house for the first time. I was baffled by the chat language, and it took a few months of sheepishly asking 'what does that mean?' before I started to get a handle on it. In those days, though, it seemed like every other day a new bit of chat slang entered the lexicon. I was a hunt-and-peck typer back then, as are most people unless they took their typing class in high school seriously. Being that way made it difficult to keep up in a chatroom with people who were abbreviating every other word, so, I joined the masses in practicing poor-man's stenography.

      I was at the age when I even thought it was cool to be able to type that way. I distinctly remember admonishing my dad for being so punctual in his emails to me. I taught him some of the slang and told him he didn't have to capitalize the appropriate letters or be so formal with his punctuation. Funny how only a few years later, when my opinion of chat speak changed, I found his relaxed, unpunctuated emails to be grating and irritating.

      In those days, chat speak was mostly invented out of laziness. No one wanted to learn to type faster or wait around for those slow typers to finish their thoughts, so abbreviations and slang ran rampant. These days, with the dawn of Twitter and the popularity of texting over the phone, the limited number of characters one is allowed to send has made chat speak, or now text speak, imperative. The problem? Most people can't seem to understand there's a time not to abbreviate. It has affected the average person's ability to write or type intelligently, and has limited our vocabulary to a more condensed lexicon of everyday words.

      This, of course, isn't true across the board. There are still some of us out there who will spell out 'tomorrow' or 'see you later'. A few people know the difference between an email between friends and a resume for work. But more and more it's becoming apparent that the two areas of life are blending together in the minds of the young. Is it laziness? Or is it pure and simple illiteracy? If aspiring writers don't know the difference between 'to' and 'too', what chance does the layman have?