Table of Contents
Texting is one of the most common ways of communication amongst students. They are more than willing to spend hours and hours texting if they had that much time.
Texting is also quite convenient compared to calls. This is because you can answer a text whenever you want, leave them on seen and answer it when you feel like it. Calling is more spontaneous where you need to converse back and forth with little windows for any delays.
There are studies regarding youth texting and literacy in multiple contexts (Zebroff and D., 2018). One of these contexts includes students writing their assignments as if they texting. This has a few negative impacts on their assignment writing, In this post, you learn what those impacts are and how they can be managed.
How does Texting Affect Student’s Assignments?
More Spelling Mistakes:
While spelling mistakes are normal in any document. Texts are a medium of communication where spelling mistakes are almost never called out. For example, if you write “knw” in text instead of “know” or “uncorrect” instead of “incorrect” it is acceptable because you have gotten your point through another person. You will not lose marks over it. And if you ever point out others’ mistakes fellow students will consider you annoying.
When students get prone to texting they start making more spelling mistakes than usual simply because they are habituated to make them with nobody holding them accountable for it. Most of them do not even know that they made any spelling errors unless the reader points it out.
Incorrect Punctuations:
It is quite normal forstudents to text without using any punctuation. You may witness a few question marks and full stops but that is pretty much all. Commas and semi-colons are rare to find the only exceptions being emoticons where they are used quite often. While students do know what commas are they often forget to use them in their assignments because of how habituated they have become of this practice via texting.
Moreover, some students do not know what semi-colons are, to begin with except that they are used for emoticons. This renders their proofreading useless as well because they will be unable to detect their punctuational errors.
Proofreading is a process that helps you correct punctuation mistakes. (Helpwithdissertation, 2021). It also includes grammatical and spelling mistakes. If you are aware of how poor your proofreading skills are then you can always take help from a friend or look up “how to pay someone to write my assignment?” on the internet.
Improper Sentence Structure:
Another way texting affects students’ assignments is by causing disturbance in the sentence structure. When students are texting one another they do not care about the sentence structure and the active, passive voice concept does not exist. This is because texting is informal and you just have to convey your message which does not require you to be careful about the sentence structure.
Since you are not bound by any readability score you do not have to worry about the sentence structure and can structure it however you like as long as the other person can comprehend it. This reflects in students’ assignments as well because they are now consuming active voice with voice and even messing up the tenses.
For example where students have written sentences like “she aint got nothing on her” instead of writing “she has got nothing on her” these things lower your readability score because of which you will get a bad grade in your assignment. The flow of the entire assignment is disturbed because of such sentences.
Useless Abbreviations:
You are required to use abbreviations in assignment writing but these abbreviations are not the same as in texting. For example, in assignment writing, you can use the abbreviation of names of law and cooperation but texting takes it a step further.
In texting, abbreviations are often used to showcase expressions. For instance, “lol” refers to lots of laughter, and “idk” refers to “I don’t know”. Students use this often while texting and end up accidentally using it in their assignments. These kinds of abbreviations are not a part of the assignment, therefore, students get in trouble for it.
Informal Tone:
It should not be surprising that students use an informal tone while texting. This is because it is more direct and students have no hierarchy amongst their classmates and friends. This type of tone can not be used for assignments that are written in a formal language such as dissertations. If students text each other in an excessive informal tone this will harm their assignment writing.
They start writing their formal assignments in an informal tone because there is a high probability that they will not even recognize what kind of tone they are using. This is because they have become desensitized to an informal writing tone.
Relying on Autocorrect:
Students have started to rely on auto-correct whenever for correcting their spelling mistakes in texts. They do not need to correct them as the auto-correct does it for them because of this students stopped learning the right spellings. This caused them to make more spelling errors in their assignments as well, reducing their quality.
How to Manage These Effects?
- Stirring students to read magazines, websites, and books, that they find exciting
- Educate them about the role technology plays in each person’s life and where they need to draw the line.
- Encourage them to practice assignment writing regularly, under supervision. They should also practice journal writing for better results.
- Suggesting students to get help from their supervisors or academic assistance services like Assignment Help UK Cheap service so they can save money too if needed.
Conclusion
Now that you know all about what happens after students have started writing assignments as if they are writing texts, give this knowledge to those in need.
Reference
- Zebroff, D., 2018. Youth texting: Help or hindrance to literacy?. Education and Information Technologies, 23(1), pp.341-356.
- HWD, 2021. Editing vs proofreading. HWD. Available at: https://www.helpwithdissertation.co.uk/blog/editing-vs-proofreading/ [Accessed March 17, 2022].
