Have you ever have a count on the number of text messages that you sent everyday?
Sending text messages has become inevitable in today's life with the increasing popularity of smart mobile phones.
Before having a iPhone, the number of SMS that i sent was only about ten per day.However,
the number turns to 30 and even more after I am using iPhone. What makes the change?
Due to the limitations of most of the 'normal' mobile phones, users can only read one single message per time, whenever we need to refer to the last message, we need to search for it from a clumsy message box. I was even merely able to save 250 messages in my previous phone, so what I could do was to delete all less important ones to save places, it makes me more difficult to trace some of the old messages. How uncomfortable it was!
Therefore,I really appreciate the message function of IPhone!
I especially like using the text emoticons in my messages a lot, it enriches the messages as I can show my mood and emotion as well. The use of punctuation is also an important feature of text messages. Sometimes, the emoticons and punctuations can replace words. For example when I am angry, I will just send '!!!!!!' to represent my anger. When I am wordless, I will send '......'. It is time saving, easy and people can still understand you.
To think deeply, does sending text messages affects my English literacy?
Sometimes, I write abbreviation forms of words like 'u',becoz' when I am doing academic writing. Yet, I will always PROOFREAD my writing for a few times at least. The spelling checking of Microsoft word also helps me a lot when I am doing my assignments. Therefore, I think it really isn't a big matter for me.
It's interesting to consider the effect of technological changes on the way that we text - for example, with modern smartphones like the iPhone it is much easier to input text, and the phone completes the words for me as I type. That means that texting in full words and sentences is much easier than it was before, and using abbreviations like 'b4', 'cu' and so on doesn't save much time. Do you think that these technological changes could have an effect on the language used? Are your text messages using textspeak less?
回覆刪除Yes, the self-correct function of the iphone really makes my words more'complete' yet I have recently closed the function.The reason is that I really like using textspeak in texting as it enables me to send more 'accurate' messages reflecting my mood and my tone. The emoticons is another must have items for me.
回覆刪除How interesting that you prefer not to use auto-complete. Actually, I was thinking that Apple has made an interesting choice by restricting the dictionary in their auto-complete program to standard English only (and not text speak). I think there must be a lot of users like yourself who prefer text speak, for whom text speak would seem more natural in an SMS message. Apple could easily cater for these people by entering common abbreviations and so on, but they have decided not to do so. I wonder why not? Any thoughts?
回覆刪除Maybe it helps to create a kind of professional image? And the Netspeak among different countries varies, so it may be different for Apple to do so.
回覆刪除I seldom send SMS/chat on MSN so I have a problem to write or read Netspeak langauge. Sometimes, I feel being ignored because i do not use the same language as my friends use. Netspeak is no longer just a language but a sign for certain identity.
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