Thursday, January 24, 2013

Digital Media Changing Language?

As I read this article on digital media's effects of our English language, I noticed that this language change is not something that has just started to happen. Grammar has been changing throughout the ages, and today that is just continuing. I do feel, however, that our generation is getting too lazy with our grammar rules and that this could have a negative effect on future generations. Many of us do not want to take the time to learn these rules and decide that it doesn't matter one way or the other. We have technology that will correct our mistakes, so why do we need to learn how to be grammatically correct?

 "[I]f you type a misspelled word (or phrase) into Google, chances are the search engine will land you pretty much at the same list of sites you would have reached had you been a finalist in the National Spelling Bee." This is something that, in my own experience, I have realized how lazy I become thanks to technology. Since I know that google will correct my spelling or give me the same results if the word I am searching is spelled wrong, I don't even try to spell correctly many times. There are some words that I have always had trouble spelling, but I don't bother learning because I know that it will be corrected for me.

"Whatever the benefits of digital media, it is destroying the ability of young people to construct the basic unit of the the English Language... the sentence." I do not find this statement to be true. The large majority of my friends will go crazy if they see a grammatical error or poor sentence structure, and every one of them has some sort of digital media that they use. It is not harming our youth, other than making them a little lazier, which can also be see as just making things easier, but rather just changing the way we go about doing things. The way we communicate with spoken and written language has changed over time and will continue to do that as we progress throught this technological age.


                                        

1 comment:

  1. Excellent resource to support your position on language and digital media. I love grammar girl! I use her site when I'm writing papers!

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