Changing How We Read and Write

The scene is a junior high classroom, the year - 2006. Seated beside one another, girls attempt to pass notes with out being noticed; casually reaching down, grabbing the folded paper, stuffing it inside a notebook and checking their surroundings before unfolding it to read. Inside, what would you find? Besides smudged cursive and gossip - textspeak was also a common sight. My friends often used "lol" or "haha" in notes. Emoticons were making their way from our instant message conversations at night, to our notes during class.

Being junior high girls, of course, it isn't all that shocking that silly things like smiley faces made their way into our notes - but it's sometimes hard to imagine writing to someone with humor and not including an "lol" or "haha," as so often was seen on Myspace at the time, and is seen today on Facebook. The way we communicated was immediately changed with the introduction of textspeak into our lives. This is a similar phenomena to that which Carr is speaking of in his article, however, I'm not sure we should judge it so harshly.

Shakespeare to Twain to the writers of tomorrow - language is always changing. That is not to say we should be allowed to use "lol"'s in school work, but I don't think it should be so frowned upon that we are shaping our own language - we are not the first to do so, and certainly won't be the last. I do agree with Carr that I feel my attention growing shorter and shorter for books and long articles - including his. The information available at the tip of our fingers on the Internet isn't all bad, though, as he pointed out: "A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after." And, in the same way, writing papers for class has become a lot easier for us students.