OMG! English Teachers H8 Texting
by Russell Shaw
Remember a few years ago when instant messaging first was widely used? The alphabet soup and shorthand of IM drew rancor from English teachers who were afraid that this lingua franca was training students and adults alike into becoming bad spellers in the “real world.”
As if they weren’t already.
Now, as an article in the September 4 edition of USA Today attests, some of those same dreads are popping up with regard to texting abbreviations.
The main thesis @work here (sorry, meant at work here) 
is that with so many teens and under texting like mad everywhere but the classroom, some of the shorthand that works so well in text messages doesn’t work so well in, say, compositions.
To make her point, article author Tracey Wong Briggs cites two authoritative figures:
“No large academic studies have confirmed it, but anecdotally, you can see text-speak creeping into students’ writing, says Kathleen Blake Yancey, Florida State University English professor and president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English,” Briggs writes.
” ‘There are some teachers who are not happy to see LOL in the middle of a paper,’” Briggs quotes Yancey as saying.
Briggs then mentions that last year, “veteran high school English teacher Ruth Maenpaa started noticing how much text messaging was affecting her students, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The first time Maenpaa flagged the use of ‘4′ for ‘for’ in an essay,” Briggs writes, “the student said she was so used to text-messaging that she didn’t even think about it.”
Hmm. I wonder how many English teachers text.
