Crafting Draft 1
21 April 2014

Cellphones are most common in society. The ease of access allows us to have the world at our fingertips 24 hours a day and we never have to unplug. We can surf the web, book a flight, check the weather, and message a friend 1000 miles away without leaving our bed. Texting has fast become the preferred form of communication for young adults; however, students need to be dissuaded from texting during class because of the result in loss of valuable class time, lack of effective communication skills, and consistent use of improper English leading to a negative impact on students’ learning. Maryellen Weimer, PhD recently posted in Teacher Professor Blog “most students don’t multi-task …show more content…

We’ve all heard it takes approximately 21 days to form a habit. Just consider how much texting 1 person can do in 21 days. Chat-speak becomes second nature; almost a second language to be used in day to day interactions. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle proclaimed. During the learning process, new neural pathways are created; if students are repeatedly using chat-speak in place of proper grammar and sentence structure, chat-speak soon becomes second nature. Fang-Yi Flora Wei, PhD states “Now we see that in-class texting partially interferes with a student’s ability to pay attention, which prior studies show is necessary for effective cognitive learning.” Recently I assisted my manager conducting interviews for an open position in our office. We received over 50 resumes and immediately eliminated any resumes with grammatical errors. Some of these errors could have been oversight on the applicant, but there were a few who had obvious chat-speak errors. Once of those errors was the use of “cuz”. This applicant could have been a wonderful addition to our office, but they did not take the time to correct their errors. We assumed that they did not know how to clearly communicate, pay attention to detail, or simply thought utilizing chat-speak was acceptable. Proper grammar and sentence structure helps us to effectively communicate with each other. Letter writing, email, and essays all require students