We're Important, You Know?

                     Dot dot dot, oh no! You are taking too much space. Let's delete you. How about using the modern way of communicating? Instead of "you are" let's use U R. Oh, that looks better and cool! OMG, LoL, u, btw, lmao, plz, tnx, and more! These new shortcut words are very helpful tools for texting, Facebook and other social network. But, are we communicating well with our readers? Is there any confusion after reading your post? Are we even realizing that we are already making the English language endangered like the Houston toad?

                    Texting shortcuts words are handy for people who are slow typers, who are trying to save money per text and others with disabilities. It also saves us time and effort for calling. But most of the time we are unaware that this can affect the receiver. With these shortcuts and missing punctuation marks, there's only one direction to go- which is miscommunication. Like this letter below, grab a piece of paper, pencil and punctuate this letter so that one way shows the love that Gloria had for John, while the other shows her complete disdain.

Type your two letters in the comment box below!

                                  

                                                               
                    To get some information, there are approximately 500,000 English words, the average native speakers has a speaking vocabulary of approximately 15,000 - which I learned from my class. How many words do you know? Do you write them correctly? Do you use punctuation? Punctuation marks are important in writing. They're traffic signs. The words are like cars, trucks, motorcycles and others vehicles on the road that need punctuation marks.

                    You know punctuation marks, don't you? For some reason, they aren't as popular as before when this new generation are not using them as often. They're like little things that will help readers understand your message. Periods, commas, semicolon, exclamation point, question mark, quotation marks, brackets, hyphen and others. I teach the five year olds with this at school, as if we are driving and then we stop, pause, get excited (drive fast) and that was about it - since they're too young to get in trouble knowing more than what they should know. But we shouldn't be teaching them this shortcut way of communicating.

                   I checked out this book from the library called Eats, Shoots, &Leaves by Lynne Truss. She was recommended by my English instructor at school. I'd like to share a few illustrations from Lynne Truss' book  of why commas make a difference. Check below:

 

 

Illustrated by: Bonnie Timmons from the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

                    I also use shortcut in writing because our phones will only allow us to text for 300 characters, unlike, Facebook updated theirs, we can write as many words as we can. However, when we write an email or letter to our professor or an employer please don't forget to write and use words and punctuation marks correctly. You don't want look like you don't know anything about writing words. Don't worry, you are not alone (I am learning how to punctuate too). We are all learning to speak and write the way our English professors want us to be.

                   "To prevent havoc, like the road that needs traffic signs to help drivers, words need punctuation marks to help readers understand."-Ehssa

To order books from Lynne Truss, click the links below.