Summary of 'Txtng is Killing Language' by John McWhorter

John McWhorter tells that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writing ability among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. Texting is not writing at all. If humanity had existed for 24 hours, writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. That is how much of a latterly thing of writing. The first there is a speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. Speech is much looser. It’s much more telegraphic, much less reflective, it’s very different from writing. In a distant are now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. If we can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like we speak. One we have think that can receive the message then we have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak, and that’s where texting comes in. Texting is very loose in its structure. No one think about capital letters or punctuation when one texts. Now, there is new structure coming up. For example, in a convention which is LOL. We generally think of as meaning ‘ laughing out loud’. But if we text now we will notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It’s evolved into something that is much subtler. Another example is ‘slash’. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today, it’s used to change the scene or changing the topic. The way John’s thinking of texting is that what we are seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing which they are using along side their ordinary writing skill. Texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it’s an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.