Unit 1 project Original Text: McWhorter

Sarvarbek Usmonov

English 106

Unit 1 project

• 
  Original Text: McWhorter
  
• 
  Text Re-Write Format: Instagram Posts with pictures
  

Text of instagram posts

Many people think that texting is a really bad thing. They believe that texting leads youngsters to lose their writing ability and make a lot of grammatical mistakes when they write. I disagree with this statement and I will try to give reasons for this. To prove that idea is wrong the first thing we need to do is we have to understand what language really is and then we will understand texting is not the same as writing.

If we think about language, it has existed for at least 80,000 years as a speech. People talked and that is the main thing that we use language most. Interesting fact is if we imagine humanity had existed for 24 hours, they started writing only at about 11:07 p.m. You can now understand how late writing came out.(McWhorter, 2013)
I’m not saying writing is not important or is not part of language, writing has some advantages like when you write you can look backwards and reread what you wrote, you can do things that are much less likely if you're just talking. For example, you can see very long sentences in books or things like that. They will be like 3 or 4 lines or maybe longer than that but we don’t use this kind of sentences while we are speaking. We usually use casual speech and it is very different from writing. The fact that we use 7 to 10 words in a sentence while we are speaking casually. In casual speech we omit inessential words. That is what real speech is like and it is very different from writing. We naturally tend to think writing is a language because we see language written often, but that is wrong. Language is speech. They are two different things.
In the past it was common to speak like you write. So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie like "Aha, ladies and gentlemen," and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. It is formal. They used long and complex sentences.
Well, if you can speak like you write, then you might want to also sometimes write like you speak, which is really cool. It was impossible in the past and you know everything about that. But then things like computers or smartphones were invented and it became possible. Because if you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow you to write like you speak. And that's where texting comes in. Texting is very poor in structure and grammar. No one thinks about spelling rules or capital letters or anything like that but the thing is do we think about these things when we speak? Absolutely NO. So why do we have to think about them when we are texting? Actually texting is fingered speech. That is exactly what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing.
But still you might think we see this wrong structure and a lot of grammatical errors and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and that is the reason we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense. But we have to understand that in this new kind of language, there is a new structure coming up.
The way I'm thinking of texting these days is young people are developing a whole new way of writing, which they're using with their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. The fact that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the times of "Love Story," but they would understand what was on that message board. If you take that person from 1993 to our time and if they read a very typical text written by a 20 years old today I am sure that they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something on their little devices.

Screenshots of instagram posts

Language Shifts in an Academic Article and TED Talk

I decided to re-write McWhorter(2013) “Txting is killing language. JK!” into an instagram addressed to youngsters and international students in/from my country. In so doing, I altered vocabulary, structures and length of sentences and did not include some information that is in the speech to better suit this new audience and digital medium.
I used less academic vocabulary in my rewrite and tried to find words that are shorter and easier to understand but it is not the same in the original text(or TED Talk). Author used more complex sentences and more academic words, so that was in higher register. But I changed that to a casual register with short sentences that are easier to understand. The reason that I used these kind of words is because most of my followers are learning English and they wouldn’t understand if I used more academic words. But in the original text you can see a lot of words that might be difficult to understand. I sent the original transcript of the video to my friends and asked to give me a list of words which were difficult to understand or they don’t know the meaning and I got words like emergent complexity, occasion, telegraphic, reflective, engage, theoretically, empathy, bidialectal, mundane.... And this list was not short… That’s why I tried not to use this kind of words in my rewrite.I believe that If someone who is in an elementary level in english read my posts(my rewrite) he/she can easily understand what I mean through the text.
Another thing I did to make my posts in the casual register is I tried to shorten longer sentences. The reason for that is people on instagram are very lazy to read long sentences, like 10 or more words and people do not use that kind of long sentences in casual speech. If you see my rewrite I wrote sentences with less than 7 to 9 words but sometimes it is difficult to do that. In that situation I tried to divide that sentence into 2 or 3 parts which are separated with commas. I divided the text into five parts with different ideas. That can increase the interest of the reader to posts. Also ideas are expressed more simple, for instance first I wrote the title of the main idea in a certain paragraph, then I explained and gave reasons for that idea and then example for that idea. This makes text more clear and useful.
If I wrote a post with long and boring texts my followers and anyone who reads that probably wouldn't like it. That is why I didn’t mention some information that was in the original talk in my re-write. To decide which facts to include in my re-write I asked some questions from myself like “How interesting will this be to my audience?” or “Will that be useful for the person who is reading my post?”. To make things more interesting I used different pictures for five different posts which are related to the facts that I mentioned in that paragraph/post.

References

McWhorter, J. (2013, February). Txting is killing language. JK!!! [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk/transcript