Without any doubts, the Internet is the place, where lots of people, students in particular, like to spend their time, communicate, being far away from each other, send messages, discuss novelties, and share other interesting for them information.
However, the way students share this information turns out to be rather unique. Such letter-combinations like plz, thnx, nbdy, hait, or hayd, are known to the vast majority of Internet users, and they are certainly of what each of them mean.
The major point of this paper is to clear up whether such Internet slang, emails, and text messaging has positive or negative influence on students, their education, and language development. Of course, there are certain pros and cons of the Internet, and it is necessary analyze the impact of our modern Internet slang on our future generation.
Someone calls the Internet a disease, someone tells how wonderful to spend one more hour online, and someone just do not what to do with all those web pages. There are so many attitudes to emailing and text messaging.
Lots of people prefer real life communication in order to observe the emotions, to follow the reactions, to provide with some support, and, finally, to know for sure whom you are talking to. However, when you emailing to someone, you cannot care about your appearance, you may do several things, and express your emotions by means of funny images.
Professor Ellen Seiter truly admits that “the propensity of kinds and teens to use e-mail and IM makes them better able to write and communicate, even if it’s not on paper.
All types of writing helps all other types of writing.” (Olsen and Suri, 2007) She believes that the most significant thing about writing is an ability to express thoughts; but how exactly students do it, it does not actually matter.
“Email has brought an undue familiarity. People use words like ‘yo’ and ‘hey dude’ that are perfectly appropriate for peers but not for professional communication.” (Friess, 2003) To my mind, here is the major negative point of e-mailing and text messaging.
People change every day polite and complete words into some letters, acronyms, and icons. PAW (Parents are Watching), LOL (Laugh Out Loud), and (L) MIRL (Lets Meet in Real Time) – these are the phrases or just letters students communicate with. (Jones 2006, 10)
Is it our future? Is it the way, we are going to communicate with time? If it is so, then our parents need to buy new dictionaries and start getting their one more education in order to be able to comprehend their children language. Students forget how to write ordinary words.
Some of them already cannot write the words entertainment or government properly. This is why it is crucially important to divide our Internet communication and pay more attention to this real life. Real emotions, touching, and observations are much more interesting, and students should known enough words to describe all this beauty around.
To my mind, email is a means to communicate with people, who are really far away. To send a message, it is possible to use some short words and known acronyms.
But, when we talk about our education and students’ literacy, these words are not appropriate, and we should forget about them and remember all those meaningful words, we learnt, in order to demonstrate proper literacy and ability to communicate on a high level.
Bibliography
Friess, Steve. “Yo, Can U plz Help Me Write English?” USA Today. March 31, 2003. <https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/2003-03-31-chat_x.htm>
Jones, Ryan. Internet Slang Dictionary. Lulu.com, 2006.
Olsen, Stefanie and Suri, Sabena. “Say so Long to Traditional Letter Writing.” CNET News.com, August 24, 2007. <https://www.cnet.com/topics/culture/>