Text messaging is moving on from being an emerging trend to becoming the cultural norm. I get several text messages everyday; I got 12 text messages yesterday alone. Text messages have gone from being very brief and up to the point, to being extremely vague and lengthy, and in many cases, serving no purpose at all. While text messages use abbreviations and different lingo to express different words, these words overall do not make the messages any clearer, and sometimes they also fail to shorten the length of a text message.

My first text message of the day read “Sup! its frekin hot 2day! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” with 18 occurrences of the letter A in the last word. Such long expressions are funny when used from time to time, though they become annoying if used all the time. Many people realize that sending one line of text message doesn’t express their thoughts clearly, so they send whole paragraphs of confusing text, as if that would make complete sense. What these people don’t realize is that sending long messages sometimes results in having the message divided into two or more parts, making it very inconvenient for the receiver of those multiple messages. Most people nowadays don’t send a text message that says “john fell down and was crying. heh i was laughing so hard“; instead, people write “john fel dwn & wz :’-( LOL FNY wht a retard ^^ ttyl“, to shorten the original text message by almost 50%, yet adding useless text that makes the shortened form even longer than the original text. Similarly, some abbreviations have resulted in the abbreviation itself becoming longer than the actual word. Saying someone “rocks” transformed into “rks” and then into “roxors“, though people love saying “roxors” all the time since it sounds cooler.

Just like other forms of communication that get overused, text messaging is assumed by many to be a platform to practise essay writing. Messages like “Call me @ 7pm dear“, “I love you honey” and “Die you moron” used to mean something before, keeping the purpose of the message very clear, and often times sincere. Nowadays, text messages are usually sent simply because they can be sent. People have even started using abbreviations and lingo in regular chats and emails, as if standard english was becoming too hard for people to handle. I usually send short, clear text messages, as I realize not everyone has their cell phone bills paid by their parents. Somehow, the focus has shifted from how to convey a message through a text message, to how to make a text message really fancy. No wonder most of the text messages look stunningly ugly, and at the same time, make no sense at all.

As most would ask and say in a text message: wat do u tink of dis? Do u hav ne opinion on dis? Do u snd txt msgz uzn normL abbr of wrds, or do u snd txt msgz uzn d nu lingo datz stil brewing? or do U not uz txt msgz @ aL? L8r