Let's waste time...by spending time online but still use correct punctuation

The world is a rapidly changing place and the reality is, people are changing and they are the ones who choose how to change the use of language and its punctuation. However, punctuation needs to still have concrete rules so a downfall of literacy will not occur and ruin the future.

Social media has become a part of our everyday lives. Our hours are consumed by spending hours on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, texts, and emails. Most of the time these sites force users to contain their thoughts into a word limit and “users are forced to be concise and less flowery with language” (Source F). Although a site like Twitter “discourages wordiness” and “can actually make you a better writer”, in the words of Amanda Cosco, it is also damaging the abilities an everyday person should have. The executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller is “worried that new technologies erode our ability to do things like remember directions or memorize phone numbers…he argues that new technologies encourage forgetfulness” (Source F); instead of having to memorize easy numbers and facts, today, people can simply rely on social media to remember these facts for them. This causes people to then not only disregard, but also forget the use of punctuation in exchange to use more characters in their statuses.

This lack of punctuation rules is “contributing to the downfall of literacy in the modern world, conjuring dystopian images of roving bands of youths communications via weird alpha-numerical hybrid codes” (Source A). In the Hitchings article, it states that the use of “internet talk” has cause users to hyphenate and make up abbreviations which results in an ignored use of correct punctuation. This then consequentially leads to a collapse in the professional and sophisticated aura punctuation used correctly gives off. The constantly changing punctuation rules will also add towards the downfall of literacy because then teachers would have the inability to teach students grammar. If there are no concrete rules educators would then have to resort to social media to keep up with the latest trend of how a certain type of punctuation is used. Some may argue that punctuation like semicolons only “show you’ve been to college” (Source E), but in reality they “so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid” (Source E). Punctuation has the ability to make one seem educated and professional.

Why we need grammar: http://www.buzzfeed.com/emmyf/25-biggest-comma-fails

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adamdavis/examples-proving-we-need-to-be-more-careful-with-grammar