Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about text messages. Over the last few years, they have become an everyday part of my world. My husband and I use them to send notes to each other throughout the day. Some times these are brief tidbits of important information that we need the other to know. Other times, we just send notes to say we’re thinking of one another. I sometimes imagine these as the modern day version of the note slipped in the briefcase or lunch box.

Recently, my friends and I have begun to use text messages more often as well. Maybe it’s because we’re all over 30 and texting somehow makes us feel younger. Or maybe it’s that texting is just convenient. Whatever the case, when several of us were together for dinner recently, we began to talk about our text message habits. This was really sparked by a message I had sent to a friend that read “Perfect day for a fro yo.” She didn’t respond, but I just assumed that was just because she was busy. When I next saw her, however, I did comment on her lack of reply. Her response was “What the heck is fro yo?” My snarky remark was something along the lines of “Frozen yogurt!!! Of course!” It tunrs out that she first thought I misplaced a letter but then thought I was using some sort of fancy text lingo that she didn’t understand. The re-telling of this to our larger group sparked a discussion about the use of text lingo: who uses it and why we do or don’t. The basic consensus was none of us do. The general feeling seemed to be that simplifying the words in the manner of using “u” instead of “you” or “l8tr” for “later” was butchering the English language. Basically, we saw ourselves as above doing that.

A few weeks later I found myself in a similar discussion with a former colleague and a former student. I had recently completed a data analysis project for my Academic Language and Literacies class in which I analyzed all the writing of one student for one day. Within that writing were 51 text messages. I was telling my former student, a recent high achieving high school graduate preparing for her first semester of college, and my former colleague, a journalism and English teacher, about the project and that what had struck me was the fact that the text messages I analyzed all contained full words. In other words, no text lingo. Both remarked that they never use text lingo, that doing so was just a shortcut used by lazy teenagers who don’t really know how to write full words. Basically, they were of the same mindset as my friends.

In fact, this was the mindset I used to have. And in practice it is the mindset I still have. Even when I send an e-mail message I can’t just let a mistake go if I notice it before pressing send. It’s like I have this inability to just let the mistake slip by. If I look back over my text message and find that I forgot to capitalize a letter, it takes every ounce of will power I have not to go back and fix that word, and I would never think of using an abbreviation. It turns out, my heavily tattooed, 27-year old, San Francisco-living brother thinks the same way. When I asked if he ever uses text messages, he left me a voicemail saying this:

Juliet I apologize for not returning your e-mail yesterday . . . I don’t use shorthand, pager code, whatever because it’s freaking annoying. People need to stop being lazy and write out full sentences. Next thing you know people are going to turn in papers in school that are written in text code. It’s a lazy generation Julie. It is a lazy generation, and I am not going to stand for it.

Perhaps it is something in the way the two of us were raised that makes us incapable of reducing our written expressions to this sort of modern shorthand. It certainly didn't affect our opinions about tattoos, but maybe because text messaging is a type of language, it falls into the same category as proper speech.

I have to say, now that I have had the opportunity to learn more about the nature of literacy, I have a different understanding of text messages. In fact, I used students’ understanding of text messages to explain academic literacy to a group of teenagers last fall. When speaking to them, I asked them to tell me their favorite examples of text lingo. Up on the board I listed things such as “IDK, ROFL, OMG, L8R, CU, K, BRB, TTYL, THNX, 4, and EVRY1.“ Once I had exhausted their knowledge, I went to the back of the room and tried to read the list phonetically. Naturally, everyone started laughing. I used this opportunity to explain to the students that they had a texting literacy that many people don’t have. They can interact in conversations using those abbreviations, whereas someone just walking in off the street might not be able to. I then tried to make the connection for them to academic literacy, saying that it is the literacy used in school and that, just like text lingo, it has to be learned.

And so that brings me back to thinking about my position on text messages. Is text messaging its own literacy? I do believe it is. Our job as teachers is to help students know when text lingo is appropriate and when it is not. In many ways, this seems similar to my realization in seventh grade that using the word “like” to mean “said,” as in “He’s like” in my response to literature was not appropriate even if I did use it when I spoke. Our students need to understand that there are certain sets of rules that come with speaking academically, just as there are certain rules we follow when talking with our friends that are different from the rules we follow when talking with our parents or our bosses.

So maybe I need to embrace my texting literacy instead of snootily turning my nose up at it. Maybe if I showed my students that I was willing to learn how to be literate in their world, they would be willing to take the plunge to become literate in my world.