In DL today, there was an article whose topic many have debated on before, that of whether technology has reduced our ability to converse fluently and accurately. The article has taken a twist, like some others before, and has defended that with technology, our standards of communication has improved rather than declined.

The article draws from a study done by a professor, which first finds, not surprisingly, that the youth in particular are writing much, much more than those who went before them, those who would "virtually never construct a paragraph again" once they left the confines of schools. Secondly and more importantly, it finds that the reason why our standards of textual communication has improved stems from the fact that we actively employ Kairos, or the "(assessment) of their audience and the subsequent (adaptation) of their tone and technique to best get their point across". It cites "the fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing."

This theory does have its loopholes. What happens to the blog writer who panders to people who write with fractured English themselves? Neither side is aware what exactly constitutes good writing. Their best way to get their point across apparently seems to be with capital letters and heavy dosages of punctuation marks.

The throngs of Singaporean youth who post detailed but broken sentences of despair on their blogs surely do not adhere to the theory that their language should improve, just as you don't get far playing sports with those just as bad as you. I believe that the professor had at some point assumed that the case would not be as such, after all, she was doing a study based on texts written by those in Stanford University, not from Damai Secondary.

The article also cited that the professor "did not find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper". Again, this is coming from students who attend a good university; they are more aware of how to switch their styles of writing, if they needed to in the first place. In any case, terms such as 'brb' and 'lol' are the 'texting speak' they were looking for, as mentioned in the article, but I believe that 'texting speak' more importantly involves improper sentence structure and phrasing, which is more likely to affect a person's ability to communicate outside of the internet that where simple lingo is concerned. Not only can one make the switch between "brb" and be right back easily compared to switching his or her sentence structuring completely, such lingo is also much more applicable to online conversations that tend to be more personal and relaxed; their presence in essays and assignments is unlikely to surface in the first place.

Lastly, the article also cited that the fast paced nature of society today, along with Twitter, has made us unknowingly improve our ability to communicate with brevity and accuracy, quickly. Or as the article puts it, to "deploy haiku-like concision". I can't really accept that at face value, I think that while less is said more often, the case that more is said in less is untrue. Twitter updates don't tend to condense things beautifully, they simply make the information less bulky at once. If you have something that can dispute this, I'd be happy if you could show it.

In the book that I have on repartee, which often is done best with brevity, so many examples come from BI, or Before Internet. Those that come after are few and far between, which I would think possibly reverses the argument of the professor. Those who fully appreciate the language are more able to grasp brevity than those who begin with brevity in mind.

To sum it up, I believe that the research done, while examining over 14 thousand pieces of writing, hardly constitutes 'exhaustive' if they were all from students from one good institution. Kairos does not always make us put in the conscious effort to write better, and 'texting speak' is hardly a comprehensive measure of the way the internet is affecting our ability to write well. Articles today may tend to aim to be condensed and brief, but brevity, in my opinion, means less of writing in short and sweet sentences and more of writing with words that mean so much in so little.

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