140 Word Essays

One of the primary goals of abbreviations in text- or Twitter-speak is to condense an utterance to fit the 160 character limit of a text-message or the 140 character limit of a Twitter post (or Tweet).

He points out that the average texter is aware when they are breaking the rules.

He or she is aware of the ways that text-message-speak distorts Standard English — aware, in fact, to the point of revelry.

We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch).

E-mail shorthand fails to live up to the grammatical standards of typed or handwritten letters.

This resource is also suitable both for Edexcel and Cambridge IGCSE students.

Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar.Students aren’t terrified to send text messages or post status updates to Twitter or Facebook, but they are often terrified to write academic papers.David Crystal writes, in , “The popular belief is that texting has evolved as a twenty-first-century phenomenon — as a highly distinctive graphic style, full of abbreviations and deviant uses of language, used by a young generation that doesn’t care about standards.Rather, we must think consciously (and practically) about how our students’ conceptions of (and contexts for) writing are changing, and we must approach the teaching of grammar in new and innovative ways.While I agree that technology has wrought a certain violence upon grammar, I would argue that writing instructors can exact an even more punishing and permanent sort of violence.His use of the word “deviant” here is telling, suggesting that, in the eyes of detractors, text-messaging as a medium threatens not just grammatical errors, but moral infractions.It isn’t just that technology, and text-messaging in particular, threatens to undermine language, but in so doing, it threatens to undermine the very culture upon which literacy is so precariously perched.Some essays have also got some useful tips on the side about the structures.My students found this resource very useful to expand their complex structures and build a range of set phrases before their exam.Crystal goes on to refute this belief a few pages later, writing, “All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong, or at least debatable.Its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy” (9).