Lrn how 2 txt

[vilakins]

The local community centre put a pamphlet in our letterbox this week about their various classes: art, exercise (I did Tai Chi there), various beginners' classes in different languages--and this one.

Text Like a Teenager

Have you ever wanted to learn the art of texting? Do you have trouble deciphering messages on your phone, or are you just not sure how to use the text facility? Come along on Tuesday afternoons and find out how to improve your texting capabilities.
Starting Tuesday 24 July, 4.00 to 4:30pm for 6 weeks. [my bolding]

What, showing people how to text will take that long, or are the abbreviations the difficult part?

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

It might take that long to show me where everything is, and fix it in my head. All mine are in caps because I don't know where the lower case is. I know some of the abbreviations but not where the punctuation is, except the full stop. But I don't use it enough to make the course worthwhile!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Here anyway, the case button is the # one--there might be a little arrow there--and the punctuation is on the 1 button.

[jomacmouse.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that could be very useful to know. I have to try that next time I send a text message to brother mouseling. People's names not appearing at the beginning of the sentence start with a lower case letter, and I've never investigated how to change the case before, just grumbled about it instead.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Your phone may of course differ. That's true for fairly ordinary Nokias though.

[jomacmouse.livejournal.com]

Having just tried it out, I can safely say that mine is a fairly ordinary Nokia all right :-)

Ta muchly, Nico - that'll be really handy. As long as I remember it, that is...

[jthijsen.livejournal.com]

I sometimes sit next to teenagers in the bus, and they are fast. I do notice, though, that in most e-mail messages from teenagers, grammar and punctuation are pretty much either horribly mangled or absent. They're so used to typing as if they're talking in real-time, that they don't bother re-reading or correcting what they've written. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I don't think they bother with punctuation or grammar or indeed spelling; they just want to get the message across as quickly as possible. I have no difficulty reading text-speak, but I'm pretty slow at texting. I'd like a keyboard like the one Greg has on his phone, though really, I'd call his a palm with a phone in it.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Back in the 1950s Isaac Asimov wrote a rather prescient short story about how the universal use of computers/calculators would lead to a society in which people couldn't do even simple arithmetic. I hope that texting isn't going to have a similar effect on the next generations's literacy.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the reinvention of mental arithmetic; I remember that story.

It may already have. hafren gets people applying for her literature course by e-mail--in txtspk.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

[John Laurie]Doomed! We're all doomed![/John Laurie]

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the invading Nazi doesn't know it. Practice makes perfect, man! Come along now, flex thumbs and get to it! [/Captain Mainwaring]

[imhilien.livejournal.com]

A six week course on learning to txt lk a tenagr? Aha. Hahaha.

Someone wants to make a quick buck, methinks...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It's only $3 a class so I suspect the Hustle team won't hire them.

[florencisalesas.livejournal.com]

Well, it is a bit as "Learn to short an arrow as far as possible from the bull's eye".
It is so cool be ignorant and keep that "great quality" now...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

There are some conventions to the form (accepted abbreviations etc) but kids also prefer that their parents don't understand their conversations with their friends. At school, my friends and I passed notes in other alphabets so that teachers couldn't read them. :-) Kids have always liked codes.

[daiseechain.livejournal.com]

U wot? Wrds fl me!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

lol me 2

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Even my youngest (OK, she was 20 last birthday so doesn't count) uses real English in her texts, as do her friends. It distinguishes them from chavs.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That's understandable! We don't have chavs here (westies are different); people use abbreviations in texts or e-mails as it suits them. I only do it with friends.

[trixieleitz]

I find the predictive texting on my phone makes it quicker to type standard English than text-speak. I only abbreviate if I need to stay inside the character limit.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I didn't have that on my last phone but I do now, and it is very good.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I mostly use real words, which is a bitch in Finnish because we have so many long words:P. But boy, I want to send my parents to that class. Dad insists on calling me or having me call him even if most of our conversations are "ok, see you there at 12:00" and things like that, which could easily be texted. Would save money, anyway.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why most people do it, and because you can do it unobtrusively too. I hate loud phone conversations in public, esp restaurants and cafes.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Well, the first week they learn to switch on their phones, and then they work their way up to Advanced Texting Grammar OMG LOL in the last week.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty much what I was thinking. :-)

[norda.livejournal.com]

I will often bellow at Crystal, my semi-daughter, "Speak in Human!" if she has access to a computer to e-mail me and *still* insists on using textspeak.

She says she has to retrain her mind to think in full sentences.

That terrifies me, considering she wants to be a published writer.

My husband Michael and I look at the textspeak phenomenon as a bit of Orwell made manifest.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Nuspk! ;-)

The brain is an odd thing though; while I was writing Tarrant's diary for b7friday last week, I was talking in draft sentences - "Will do dinner soon but would like cup of tea first."

So far I have been lucky never to receive txtspk in an e-mail, but apparently a lot of people shoot themselves in the foot by doing just that, and to strangers. I've seen it in posts and comments on LJ but it draws derision. With teenagers, I suspect it's also the fun of having an impenetrable code; as I said above, we used to use other alphabets to write secret notes in class.

[zoefruitcake.livejournal.com]

how much are they charging for this educational gem?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It's actually pretty cheap so they're not ripping people off. $3 (1 pound) a week, so $18 in total.

[shimere277.livejournal.com]

I can't do it - not as in I can't figure it out, but as in I can't stand it any more than I can stand online RPGs or chat rooms. There's something about those media - you lack the ability to think in completely formed sentences, but also lose the non-verbal feedback of a physical conversation. (Come to think of it, I hate talking on the phone also, but at least the phone allows you to hear the other person's tone of voice). Texting seems like the worst of both worlds - terribly flat, fragmented and abbreviated.

A linguist friend of mine has a theory that texting is part of a social movement towards of avoidance of communication while maintaining the pretense of contact.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Our RPG was done with proper dialogue; I don't know about others. You don't have to use abbreviations if you have predictive text, but I don't actually like texting myself. I'd prefer to make a phone call, and like you, I dislike those too, so texting comes last for me. My preferred medium is e-mails (or LJ).

I've heard that theory here, but the people who text a lot tend use it as another means of communication with people they also see a lot (e.g. at school or the mall).