Letter to the Editor - The Daily Mail

Dear Ms. Laura Clark,

Your article, while raising a few interesting and worrying points, completely missed the mark. Instead of blasting ‘text speak’ and saying that “Youngsters are also in danger of growing up with limited vocabularies because they spend so much of their free time on sites such as Twitter…”, perhaps you should look to the parents and authority figures who should be teaching the children about the English language before blaming technology. As a ‘youngster’ myself, I feel that you shift the blame on to text speak too much, and give it unfair credit. It is also rather insulting to observe the generation raising us, cast their responsibility on to inanimate devices, that they themselves gave us.

The fact is, is that both teachers and parents share a certain responsibility to teach children to do the right thing. Perhaps the staff should have made a better effort in making sure that the children knew to differentiate their writing styles for different contexts and situations. Instead of blaming text speak, which in my opinion (that I’m sure my fellow ‘youngsters’ share as well), is a rather efficient way to write, especially on those tiny phone keyboards. You should realise that the only reason students are using text speak in their school work is that they have not been properly taught by either their parents or teachers, to write properly. Text speak, while at times grammatically incorrect, was simply something originally created out of necessity. Before the era of the iPhone and Galaxy, people often had to limit the amount of text they used, due to bad phone plans and the complexities of having to use the physical phone keyboard. People still knew the correct spellings and the full words, but they made a conscious choice, either to look ‘cool’ or to be efficient. While your complaints about the decrease in grammar and spelling are valid, isn’t it our job to correct them? Instead of raising a child glued to their phone, perhaps parents and teachers could cooperate in making sure the child has a comprehensive education in grammar, writing, and vocabulary. Children using text speak is only a symptom of a wider problem in our society, more specifically the school system and parenting, in my opinion. Even if text speak has truly eroded our language, shouldn’t schools and parents adapt to the change and try to help students retain some basic knowledge of their own language? Is it too much to ask?

I don’t know what age the people you referenced were, but it sounds like both their parents and teachers have failed them, at least in language skills. ‘Hitler was majorly bad’ is a grammatical mistake that even a  3^rd grader (native English speaking) would not make. Which leads me to say: What on Earth happened in elementary? Issues like this should be caught and rectified, not left to fester, and written about in some tabloid! The grammatical errors made by the students, in my opinion, was caused by poor language education, one that even a life with the Amish would not improve. To point the finger at text speak as the cause for the so-called ‘erosion’ of children’s language, is simply a scapegoat for all of our failings on properly teaching this generation about the English language. Next time, make an effort, and look beyond what people are saying. Maybe try actually asking the students why they write like that? I hope to see better quality journalism next time “Daily Mail”, but glancing at the side column on your website, it seems that I shall be hoping and waiting for a long while.

Victor Mauring, 16

Abu Dhabi, UAE