Michael Cullington's Essay: Does Texting Affect Writing?

“It is appallingly obvious that technology has exceeded our humanity. “, Albert Einstein had the epiphany that technology would began to remove some of the things that make us human, such as interpersonal social skills. It is safe to say that his words are becoming true to life. Like everything else there are pros and cons with our modern technology, with the brilliant minds of people like Steve Jobs (founder of Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook), Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) we have been able to keep in contact with distant friends and family, express ourselves amongst people who share the same views, and keep up with mas media and our consistently changing society. However this newly profound way of living may not be the best way. This form of technology has delayed our basic learning skills, decreased the necessity of face to face interaction, and even lead to major addiction.

Michaela Cullington addressed a very interesting point that though texting is “taking over our lives” it has no significant effect on students writing. I happen to disagree with this part of her argument, since the start of texting, tweeting, and face booking the ability to maintain and improve basic skills such as spelling has become much more of a challenge for this generation including myself. I, along with many others have a habit of using my cellphone to assist me with spelling certain words correctly instead of doing what elementary teachers attempted to enforce and “sound it out” or “use a dictionary”. This way has become effective in texting, but not when it comes to writing essays. We don’t have autocorrect or Siri when it comes to actually writing a paper, that’s when our grammar skills are supposed to come in affect. But how are we supposed to how apply these skills if we have been enabled by modern technology? We unknowingly have made writing a harder technique