As a dialect, text (‗textese‘?) is thin and – compared, say, with
Californian personalized license plates – unimaginative. It is bleak,
bald sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk…. The dialect has a few
hieroglyphs (codes comprehensible only to initiates) and a range of
face symbols… Linguistically, it‘s all pig‘s ear….it masks dyslexia,
poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates
(6th-7th paragraph).
A qualitative inquiry into the impacts of the SMS language abbreviations on the formal
writing skills of developmental students has been carried out by Rankin (2010). The study
sampled 25 respondents from the Summer Developmental Programme of Jackson State
University in 2009. Major findings of the investigation show that participants‘ usage of SMS