I believe that Chatspeak is definitely having an impact on our language, not necessarily destroying English, but it is converting students to take shortcuts in expressing their written communication with others. “The shortcuts and acronyms that make instant messaging, text messaging, and online chatting so popular have no place in academic, business, and other formal writing settings where it is essential that all individuals involved are using language that is clear and concise” (Howard, 2007). These academic and business-like settings are exactly the arena’s that are going to be intolerant of “shortcutting.”
I remember back to the history teacher of my first semester of college that actually subtracted points from my roommate’s overall score in the class, because of some chatspeak-like abbreviations he used in an e-mail to her in the first week of class! It turned out that he missed an ‘A’ in the class by just a few points…about the amount he lost from a harmless e-mail the first week!
I believe that teachers will be the ultimate ‘traffic cops’ in trying to keep this type of communication out of classrooms, as this is solely for the welfare of students. “When it comes to students and their use of chatspeak, it will be more difficult for many to switch gears to effective and meaningful writing” (Howard, 2007). The question that I have now, in response to this article, is: how do we internalize this thought process in the younger population who are the ones making this chatspeak widespread?
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