Shelley Rodrigo's List: Access is not an Excuse

• Flipping the Switch: Code-Switching from Text Speak to Standard English

  Kristen Hawley Turner

• "[Texters are] vandals doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbors 800 years ago," said British TV presenter John Humphrys, possibly with foam-flecked lips. "Texting is bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness," wrote author John Sutherland

• If the philosopher at Syracuse University catches a student sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class, he'll end the class on the spot and walk out. It doesn't matter if there is but one texter in a large lecture of hundreds of students. If you text, he will leave.

• Computers make everyone write a lot more, and a lot longer. But they're absolutely not making them write better," says April Bernard, who teaches literature at Bennington College.

• Rhetorical Knowledge
• purpose
• different audiences
• different kinds of rhetorical situations
• ormat and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation
• appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
• Composing in Electronic Environments

5 more annotations...

• • 85% of teens ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites.
   
  • 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as “writing.”

• "What was interesting to us was how small a percentage of the total writing the school writing was," says Jeffrey T. Grabill,

• "When my children are writing first drafts,   I don't care how they spell anything, as long as they are writing   . . . If this lingo gets their thoughts and ideas onto paper quicker,   the more power to them" (Lee, 2002).
• Probably the most important thing that teachers can do is to emphasize   to students the concept of audience.

• What I recommend most strongly as a result of this study is a dialogue about this type of communication and writing between English teachers and their students. I think to ignore this situation, or simply mark online shorthand as incorrect, is a losing battle. Once my students engaged in a discussion about audience, including the appropriate times for shorthand, they seemed less reticent to edit their writing for school purposes for this type of “incorrect” grammar.