Texting Twitface

Texting Twitface:

Are We Creating a Generation of Literary Laziness?

Mirium Cushman

Central Methodist University

Abstract

Urban Dictionary defines twitface as a person who overly uses Twitter and Facebook as a means to be social instead of actually seeing their friends face to face (urbandictionary.com, 1999). We have become a society of texting twitfaces. Think about it; Twitter and Facebook accounts have reached pandemic proportions. It was found that 100 million individuals used Twitter in 2011 (Wolfe, 2011) and that Facebook had over 750 million active users, with 250 million of them accessing the website from a mobile device (Wolfe, 2012). The typical teenager sends around four-thousand text messages per month (Trubek, 2012). My eighteen year-old daughter has sent eleven-thousand texts in one month, and it is not uncommon for me to send over a thousand as well.

Is all this texting, tweeting, and Facebooking bad? Can we take this condensed writing style and adapt it to fit in a modern English or Expository Writing class? Evidence suggests that it is possible. This satirical proposal explores the topic based on my personal experiences as a full time nurse, single mom, and college student.

As a busy mom, nurse, and student, I often find myself overwhelmed by the tasks I must complete on any given day. My Expository Writing class, for example, is enjoyable but the work is tedious. When we were given an assignment to write an argument on whether we feel that shorter, more frequent writing assignments are more effective than longer, less frequent writing assignments, I groaned inwardly and thought, “Ugh! Just one more thing to add to my giant pile of stuff I need to do!”

I lamented ever going back to college, asking myself if I had made a terrible mistake, bitten off more than my ample mouth could chew, and was attempting the impossible. When I was a nursing student at Purdue (note the gratuitous plug for my alma mater), I had the silly notion that...