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2b or Not 2b

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2b or Not 2b
In chapter fifteen ''2b or Not 2b?'' of ''They Say / I Say'', David Crystal provides arguments in favour of text messaging. Crystal tries to prove his point that text messaging is not destroying the English language with great research, a lot of examples and a clear organization. As the author himself puts it, ''Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but it's long-term impact is negligible. It's not a disaster. ''. Although some people believe text messaging is pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences and raping our vocabulary, Crystal insist that. In sum, then, his view is that the abbreviations were used as a natural, intuitive response to a technological problem, but that they are also more than just time and energy saving act. He considers some texts also as linguistically quite complex.
I'm two minds about how texting effects the english language.On the one hand, I gree that texting can be very creative and that the abbreviations we use in text massaging are nothing new, he gives use countless examples like ''IOU'' (I owe you), which is known from the year 1618 . On the other hand I'm not sure if these arguments can stand against the accusations that texting is destroying the english language. For me his arguments are not convincing enough. From my own experiences (english as a foreign language) it seemed pretty hard to understand and nonsense when I heard my friends actually talking the way they text usually, like saying ''cos'' instead of ''because'' or ''lol''. Text messaging is in this case no more just about texting, it actually effects also the way we talk.

Overall I believe text messaging is a great way to communicate and motivates people to be creative and create new words or abbreviations, but it also does form its own language separating itselfs more and more from the traditional English. If its good or worse is out of my ability to judge at this time.

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